Green, Gerald 1922-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 8, 1922, in New York, NY; died of pneumonia, August 29, 2006, in Norwalk, CT. Author. Greenberg was an award-winning novelist and screenplay writer who was cocreator of the Today show television program and best known for his novel The Last Angry Man. He was born with the surname Greenberg, which he later shortened. Green's father was a doctor who would inspire the hero in The Last Angry Man. After graduating from Columbia University in 1942, Green served with the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He then completed his master's in journalism at Columbia in 1947. Green was an editor for the International News Service in New York City for three years before joining the staff at the National Broadcasting Co. (NBC). There he worked on news programs such as Chet Huntley Reporting and Wide Wide World and helped launch the Today show. His first novel, His Majesty O'Keefe (1948), was written with Lawrence Klingman and later adapted as a 1954 film starring Burt Lancaster. His Majesty O'Keefe was followed by The Sword and the Sun (1950) and The Last Angry Man (1957). Green wrote the screenplay for the latter in 1959, and it was adapted again for television in 1974. He left NBC in 1964 to become a freelance writer of books and television programs. After being nominated for Emmy Awards in 1967 and 1972 for documentary writing, he won the award in 1978 for his miniseries Holocaust, which he also turned into a novel that year. Holocaust earned Green the Dag Hammarskjold International Prize in 1979, and some have credited it with convincing the German government to lift the statute of limitations on the death penalty so that Nazi war criminals could continue to be brought to trial. Also receiving an Emmy nomination for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985), Green was an active writer of both fiction and nonfiction through the mid-1980s. Among his other books are To Brooklyn with Love (1968), The Stones of Zion: A Novelist's Journal in Israel (1971), Karpov's Brain (1982), Not in Vain (1984), East and West (1986), and the screenplay Tourist (1980).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 3, 2006, section 4, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2006, p. B15.

New York Times, August 31, 2006, p. A20.