Woolfolk, William

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William Woolfolk

Personal

Born June 25, 1917, in Centermoriches, NY; died of congestive heart failure July 20, 2003, in Syracuse, NY; son of William (a theatrical manager) and Mary (an actress; maiden name, Lyon) Woolfolk; married Dorothy Roubicek (a writer and editor), September, 1946 (divorced, 1969); married Joanna Martine Galdamez (a writer), August 28, 1971 (divorced, 1999); children: (first marriage) Donald, Donna Woolfolk Cross. Education: New York University, B.A., 1938. Politics: "Fierce." Religion: "Indifferent."

Career

Advertising copywriter, 1938-40; freelance writer for magazines, 1940-42; wrote comic book scenarios for various publishing companies, including Fawcett, Archie Comics (MLJ), Quality, Timely, and National, 1942-52; published magazines, including picture magazine Scene and short story magazine Shock, 1953-63; writer and story editor for The Defenders television series, 1963-65; freelance writer, 1965-2003. Founder and publisher of O.W. Comics, 1946-47; founder of Space World astronautics magazine, 1960. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942-43.

Member

Writers Guild, Authors Guild.

Awards, Honors

Scribner Prize for short-story writing, 1940; Emmy Award nominations for television scripts "A Book for Burning" and "All the Silent Voices"; Inkpot Award, Comic-Con International, 2002.

Writings

NOVELS

The Naked Hunter, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1953.

Run While You Can, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1955.

Way of the Wicked, Monarch (New York, NY), 1956.

My Name Is Morgan, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1963.

The Sex Goddess, 1966.

(Under pseudonym Winston Lyon) Criminal Court, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1966.

(Under pseudonym Winston Lyon) Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom (novelization of the ABC-TV television series Batman), New American Library (New York, NY), 1966.

Opinion of the Court, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1966.

(Under pseudonym Winston Lyon) Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome (film novelization), New American Library (New York, NY), 1967.

The Beautiful Couple, Collins & World (New York, NY), 1968.

The Builders, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1969.

Maggie: A Love Story, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971.

The Overlords, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1972.

The President's Doctor, Playboy Press, 1975.

We Two, Playboy Press, 1977.

The Sendai, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1981.

The Adam Project, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1984.

Thai Game, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1989.

OTHER

(With wife, Joanna Woolfolk) The Great American Birth Rite (nonfiction), Dial (New York, NY), 1975.

(With daughter, Donna Woolfolk Cross) Daddy's Little Girl: The Unspoken Bargain between Fathers and Their Daughters (nonfiction), Prentice-Hall, 1982.

Comic-book scripts included in anthologies The Spirit: Archives, Volumes 5-15, DC Comics (New York, NY), 2001-04; Superman in the Fifties, DC Comics, 2002; Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, DC Comics, 2004; Shazam!: Archives 4, DC Comics, 2004. Also author of preface for Donna Woolfolk Cross's Word Abuse: How the Words We Use Use Us (nonfiction), Coward (New York, NY), 1979. Contributor of scripts to television series The Defenders, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), 1963-65. Contributor of stories to comic-book series, including "Superman," "Batman," "Captain America," "Captain Marvel," "Blackhawk," "Spirit," "Plastic Man," and "Sub-Mariner."

Sidelights

William Woolfolk was a versatile writer who was successful in several widely divergent fields. He was the highest-paid writer of comic books during that genre's "Golden Age" of the 1940s; he was the story editor on the popular television series The Defenders in the 1960s; and he was the author of a string of best-selling novels. Woolfolk also wrote two popular nonfiction titles, one with his wife titled The Great American Birth Rite, and one with his daughter titled Daddy's Little Girl: The Unspoken Bargain between Fathers and Their Daughters. Over six million copies of Woolfolk's books have been sold, while his writing for television earned him two Emmy Award nominations. Despite all of these successes, Woolfolk is best remembered for his pivotal role in shaping some of the most enduring and beloved characters in comic-book history, including Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Spirit, and Plastic Man. An obituary writer for Comics Journal dubbed Woolfolk "one of the most esteemed of Golden Age comic-book writers." According to Eric P. Nash in the New York Times, Woolfolk once modestly admitted: "Comics have outlasted my writing efforts in other media."

Woolfolk was born in Centermoriches on Long Island, New York, in 1917. He once explained to Laura T. Ryan of the Syracuse, New York Post-Standard, "I left there as soon as I found out where I was, which was at the age of 3 months. My family insisted on coming with me." As a young man, Woolfolk wrote poetry and submitted his work to small literary magazines. However, since these magazines could only offer free subscriptions as payment for his work, he soon moved on to more lucrative writing opportunities. Woolfolk once explained: "Experimental literary magazines paid only in subscriptions, and all I ended up with were lifetime subscriptions to magazines with lives considerably shorter than my own. So I decided to give up all pretense to literature and concentrate on making a living. I wrote occasional articles and stories for commercial 'slick' magazines and for 'true confessions' and pulp magazines. I wrote gags for cartoonists, 'filler' for syndicates, and finally I composed scenarios for comic books." About writing poetry, he once remarked: "I still think that poetry is the most civilized and civilizing of the arts. If you can live without money, by all means write poetry. Very few persons have ever been beaten to death by poets." Shortly after graduating from college in 1940, Woolfolk won the Scribner Prize for short-story writing, which led to a job at an advertising agency in New York City. In his spare time, Wool-folk wrote freelance articles for magazines. He soon realized that he was making $23 a week as a writer of advertising but got paid $100 to $200 for each of the freelance magazine articles he wrote. That was when he decided to freelance full time.

Enters the Comic Book Field

The new and fast-growing comic-book industry attracted his attention, and Woolfolk was soon writing comic book scripts for a host of publishing houses. Woolfolk did not create any new comic-book heroes, but he was in high demand to write stories about Batman, Captain Marvel, Superman, and other popular characters. Alan Woollcombe, writing in the London Independent, recounted that Woolfolk's "name and fortune were secured in 1942, when Will Eisner, the creator and writer of The Spirit, was called up for military service and Woolfolk stood in for him. The Spirit, a satirical daily newspaper strip starring a masked detective, was widely syndicated, and Woolfolk scripted all the daily sequences, along with many of the (longer) Sunday ones. He became the best-paid writer in comics, raking in a weekly salary of $300 (compared to the average of about $30)." Jeff Kapalka told Frank Herron in the Post-Standard that Woolfolk "contributed to comic books at a time when the art form was new, and no one was really clear what they would turn into. He helped set the groundwork for many of the most famous heroes of comics."

One of Woolfolk's lasting contributions to comics history involved his writing for the popular character named Captain Marvel. In real life a newspaper boy named Billy Batson, whenever Billy says the magic word "Shazam!" he transforms into the adult superhero Captain Marvel. Noted for their lighthearted nature, the "Captain Marvel" adventures combined the usual action stories with a touch of whimsy. The big, strong, superhero is, after all, still a boy mentally and emotionally. Woolfolk was responsible for creating the character's famous expression of surprise, "Holy Moley!," which became widely popular across America. Some of Woolfolk's comic book scripts from this period have been gathered together in the collection Shazam!: Archives 4.

With the decline of the comics industry following World War II, Woolfolk moved on to other forms of writing. He once remembered: "Writing during the so-called Golden Age of comics, I soon became the best paid and most sought-after writer (there was little competition) in the field. I wrote for all the characters now so nostalgically remembered: Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman, Captain Midnight, Blackhawk, Plastic Man, and many others. This work paid so well, was so easy to do, and so much fun, that my versatility might have come to an end forever. But the Golden Age passed, and I moved on to become a publisher of newsstand magazines. The lifetimes of these magazines exceeded those of the experimental literary magazines I once wrote for, but not by much. Nevertheless, I prospered. I also wrote paperback suspense novels—the kind of books turned out on the same assembly line that makes license plates. It takes a kind of genius to write books so utterly devoid of content."

Woolfolk's first book, a paperback titled The Naked Hunter, was published in 1953. It was followed by two more paperback originals, Run While You Can and Way of the Wicked. In 1963 Woolfolk published his first hardcover novel, My Name Is Morgan. "The book, published by Doubleday, was a choice of two major book clubs and later appeared in three paperback versions," Woolfolk later recounted. "I decided that this was what I really wanted to do. For more than twenty years I have written almost every variety of hardcover fiction and nonfiction, from 'well-made' novels such as The Builders to science-fiction novels like The Sendai and The Adam Project, from sexy best-sellers like The Beautiful Couple to ponderous doorstoppers such as Opinion of the Court, from romantic tales and political suspense-thrillers to nonfiction accounts of father-daughter relationships and a survey of parenting in America."

Novels of Political Intrigue

Several of Woolfolk's novels focus on political problems or intrigues. Opinion of the Court, for instance, tells of a Supreme Court Justice and of the pressures he experiences both as a member of the Court and in his personal life during his first two years on the bench. The Overlords and The President's Doctor deal with imminent takeovers of the U.S. government. In The Overlords organized crime threatens national order. According to Newgate Callendar of the New York Times Book Review, the book is "a fast-paced and well written novel" that "touches something sensitive in the national psyche." In The President's Doctor the physician to the U.S. president is controlling the nation's chief through drug treatments, while a general with extreme anticommunist sentiments plans to purge the country of communist influence. A state of emergency results, in which the government permits the commission of violent acts against certain citizens, and international relations are aggravated. Eventually, an old friend of the president discovers the doctor's scheme and order is restored. Still, as Callendar remarked, "the underlying message will have you shaking more than a little bit." While Susannah Clapp, writing in the New Statesman, criticized the improbability of The President's Doctor's plot and the "weariness of the general truths in which the novel deals," Callendar described the book as "a heady mixture" that "Woolfolk dishes . . . out in great doses." The President's Doctor also impressed former U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew and former U.S. presidential physician William M. Lukash, M.D., both of whom endorsed the novel.

Woolfolk also wrote a number of love stories, among them the 1968 novel The Beautiful Couple, which sold more than one million copies in its paperback form, and Maggie , which was published in 1971. The Beautiful Couple is set primarily in Hollywood and features Oscar-winning actress Jacqueline Stuart and her husband, Brian O'Neal, a famous Irish stage actor. The two are very active sexually, both within and outside of their marriage, and the book focuses largely on the characters' love affairs and reminiscences of past intimacies. The Beautiful Couple also depicts the professional and social pressures of Hollywood, including the exploitation of child stars by ambitious parents, the unblinking scrutiny of the public eye, the profusion of alcohol, drugs, and sex surrounding a film star's life, and the frustrations and rewards of an entertainment career.

Maggie is also a story built around the lives of public figures, and it is thought by some critics to be based on the relationship between newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies. The events of the novel begin in 1918, when a wealthy newspaper publisher named Wallace Zachary Thorne becomes enamored of Maggie, a beautiful Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl. After taking a yachting trip with Thorne, who has three adult sons and is married to a woman who will not divorce him, Maggie becomes the tycoon's mistress. She lives as such for more than twenty years, during which time she and Thorne indulge in conspicuous luxury and host extravagant entertainments. The stock market crash of 1929, however, weakens both Thorne's financial resources and his spirit, and from this point until the magnate's death, Maggie serves increasingly as her lover's emotional support.

Wins Emmy Nominations

In the early 1960s Woolfolk took a break from writing books to work as a writer and story editor on the popular television series The Defenders, starring E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed. He explained: "I was seduced away from publishing into television by my good friend Reginald Rose, author of the screenplay Twelve Angry Men. He was starting a television series called The Defenders, which is now on almost everyone's list of the ten best dramatic television shows ever to appear on television. I had not written for television before, but I became story editor for the show and ended up writing many of the scripts, earning Emmy Award nominations for two of them—'A Book for Burning' and 'All the Silent Voices.'" According to James MacKillop in the Syracuse New Times, The Defenders "took gutsy stands on controversial issues when no other dramatic series did so." Nash noted that "one 1965 episode he wrote, 'All the Silent Voices,' was one of the first to deal with birth control."

Woolfolk's two nonfiction books, Daddy's Little Girl and The Great American Birth Rite, stem from Woolfolk's experiences as a parent. In Daddy's Little Girl Woolfolk and his daughter, Donna Woolfolk Cross, collect opinions and scenarios from their own lives and those of other fathers and daughters to create what they describe as "an honest account of what many people think is important to know about the relationship of fathers and daughters." One point of the book is that fathers can cause more harm than good to their daughters by being overprotective.

In The Great American Birth Rite Woolfolk joins forces with his wife, Joanna, to present what they call "as direct, thorough-going and in-depth a survey as we could possibly devise on the current American way of having babies and raising them." In doing so, the couple canvassed parents and retailers of maternity and children's products to formulate a cost-benefit analysis of the child-rearing process in the United States. Following five chapters of this analysis are chapters dealing with illegitimacy, adoption, birth defects, child abuse, family planning, and abortion. Still, as Jane Wilson remarked in a New York Times Book Review article, The Great American Birth Rite begins and ends "with one basic opinion about contemporary fecundity—it's too expensive."But, according to Washington Star reviewer Donia Mills, the Woolfolks "serve up their indictments with a delightful sense of variety and humor," while offering "common sense solutions"to the high cost of infant care and "a welcome antidote to the gushy, miracle-of-birth type volumes on the subject."

Woolfolk once commented: "My books have so far sold a total of six million copies; several have been major book club selections, but apparently I have a talent for anonymity. Having lately discovered why I am not better known, I would like to put other authors on guard against repeating my mistake. The chief warning is: don't be versatile. Put that in capital letters: DON'T BE VERSATILE.

If you enjoy the works of William Woolfolk

If you enjoy the works of William Woolfolk, you may also want to check out the following:

The comics of Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, and Jack Cole, creator of Plastic Man, as well as illustrators Lou Fine and Reed Crandall.

"I prefer writing novels because the most important qualities of being human can only be told in fiction, but we 'versatiles' write whatever comes to hand or mind. As a result, our audience changes with every book. A reader pleased with one book is certain to be disappointed in the next. Everyone knows what to expect of James Michener, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, or Helen MacInnes. And those who enjoy these authors' books look forward to each one with unbearable anticipation. No one looks forward to a new book by William Woolfolk because no one, including the author, knows what it will be.

"Take warning, fellow authors: no one is deep enough to spread himself so thin. No literary monuments have ever been erected that proclaim: 'He was versatile.' If you wish for fame, concentrate on the kind of writing you do best and prepare your ground well before you create. God himself could not make the cow until he made the grass."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Journal of Popular Culture, winter, 1994, Joseph Grixti, "Consumed Identities: Heroic Fantasies and the Trivialisation of Selfhood," p. 207.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 11, 1981.

New Statesman, February 13, 1976, Susannah Clapp, review of The President's Doctor.

New Yorker, September 3, 1966.

New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1968, review of Beautiful Couple, p. 40; August 10, 1969, review of The Builders, p. 27; December 24, 1972, New-gate Callendar, review of The Overlords, p. 14; May 18, 1975, review of The President's Doctor, p. 47; June 22, 1975, Jane Wilson, review of The Great American Birth Rite, p. 7.

Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), June 16, 2002, Laura T. Ryan, "Father and Daughter; from Different Angles, Each Tackled Writing," p. 3.

Variety, February 25, 1981, review of The Sendai, p. 27.

Washington Star, June 29, 1975, Donia Mills, review of The Great American Birth Rite. *