The directory «Plots»

Tevis Walter Stone
(1928—1984)

Walter S. Tevis was an American novelist and short story author. His books became the sources for several major films.

Tevis was born in San Francisco, California. As a child, Walter grew up in San Francisco's Sunset District, near the sea and Golden Gate Park. When he was ten years old, his parents placed him in the Stanford Children's Convalescent home for a year while they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given a grant of land in Madison County. At the age of 11, Walter traveled across country alone on a train to rejoin his family.

Near the end of World War II, the 17-year-old Tevis served in the Pacific Theater as a Navy carpenter's mate on board the USS Hamilton. After his discharge, he graduated from Model High School in 1945 and entered the University of Kentucky where he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature and studied with A.B. Guthrie, Jr., author of The Big Sky. While a student there, Tevis worked in a pool hall and published a story about pool written for Guthrie's class.

After graduation, he wrote for the Kentucky Highway Department and taught everything from the sciences and English to physical education in small town Kentucky high schools (Science Hill, Hawesville, Irvine and Carlisle). He married his first wife, Jamie Griggs, in 1957, and they remained together for 27 years.

After his first novel, The Hustler (Harper & Row, 1959), he followed with The Man Who Fell to Earth, published in 1963 by Gold Medal Books. He taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University (in Athens, Ohio) from 1965 to 1978, where he received an MFA.

While Tevis was teaching at Ohio University, he became aware that the level of literacy among students was falling at an alarming rate. That observation gave him the idea for Mockingbird (1980), set in a grim and decaying New York City of the 25th Century. The population is declining, no one can read, and robots rule over the drugged, illiterate humans. With the birth rate dropping, the end of the species seems a possibility. Tevis was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1980 for Mockingbird. During one of his last televised interviews, he revealed that PBS once planned a production of Mockingbird as a follow-up to their 1979 film of The Lathe of Heaven.

Tevis also wrote The Steps of the Sun (1983) and The Queen's Gambit (1983). His short stories were collected in Far from Home (Doubleday, 1981).

Three of his six novels were the basis of major motion pictures of the same names. The Hustler and The Color of Money (1984) followed the escapades of fictional pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson. The Man Who Fell to Earth was filmed in 1976 by Nicolas Roeg and again in 1987 as a TV movie.

A member of the Authors Guild, Tevis spent his last years in New York City as a full-time writer. He died there of lung cancer in 1984 and is buried in Richmond, Kentucky. His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greek, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Turkish, Japanese and Thai. In 2003, Jamie Griggs Tevis published her autobiography, My Life with the Hustler. She died August 4, 2006. His second wife, Eleanora Tevis, is the trustee of the Walter Tevis Copyright Trust, and Walter Tevis' literary output is represented by the Susan Schulman Literary Agency.

Sao Tome e Principe, 2009, Paul Newman as Eddie Felson