Wall Street Journal Review of Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America

William Elliott Hazelgrove’s richly anecdotal “Dead Air” is the story of Welles’s landmark October 1938 radio broadcast and the nationwide panic that resulted. Welles’s “you are there” adaptation, crafted to imitate a breaking-news bulletin, sent a tremor of panic into listeners across the country who believed it to be a real report of a flying-saucer invasion. Mr. Hazelgrove has scoured regional newspapers of the time to provide a ground-level view of the hysteria that Welles’s radio drama instilled—on the night before Halloween, no less. According to “Dead Air,” police switchboards lighted up across the nation; in Indiana, a woman ran into a church screaming: “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world!” At a Harlem police station, “thirty people arrived with all their possessions packed and told officers they were ready to be evacuated.” In New Jersey, where the fictional invasion was supposedly taking place, some listeners loaded up their cars and took to the road. Mr. Hazelgrove has provided a granular history of this landmark in fake news, placing us inside CBS’s Studio One, where Welles orchestrated every detail to his exacting standards, then outside the studio doors, where confusion reigned until media stories of the stunt set minds at ease. 17 BOoks we read this week The caution and conscience of John Dickinson, spies in the library, spooky audiobooks for Halloween and more. Welles, for his part, worried that his budding career was over; he spent the days after the broadcast pondering potential jail time and lawsuits. The young auteur was widely censured for his dangerous gambit; an FCC investigation was floated but came to nothing. Hollywood was paying attention, however. Almost three years later, “Citizen Kane” was released, and Welles’s legendary career in film had begun. Mr. Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California

Hemingways Attic Hell and Glory in Cuba and The Writing of the Old Man and the Sea

PUBLICATION JULY 1 2025

Publishers Weekly Review of Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrifed America

In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove (Writing Gatsby) chronicles the mass hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens’ poisonous gas, and even one woman’s attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria’s scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that “Americans were essentially gullible morons” and earned Welles the national recognition he’d yearned for. It’s a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. (Nov.)

Revisiting the Titanic

The Hubris of Titanic Strikes Again

We have heard this story before. The five souls lost in a technological breakdown of our most sophisticated effort to explore the seafloor and gaze at the Titanic. Titanic was a perfect example of hubris gone bad. A maiden voyage of an unsinkable ship steaming into an icefield full speed with the thought that electric sliding doors would save everyone by sealing off the sea in the bulkheads. It was the cutting edge technology of its time much like our Space Shuttle. And yet, she strikes an iceberg and five compartments are ripped open and sealed her fate. Titanic quickly became the posterchild for tempting fate by declaring science had conquered risk. We thought we had learned our lesson with more lifeboats and taking heed of wireless ice warnings. But maybe not. After 1985 discovery of Titanic we decided we could tempt fate again and descend almost three miles to the floor of the ocean to look at the last time hubris killed almost 1600 people. But we were secure that our technology would allow us to go where people were not meant to and we could offer that not only to explorers and scientist but for the people who could afford a 250,000 price tag. The very rich onnce again would ride the waves much like in 1912 and for an enormous amount of money descend to that wreck of the Gilded Age. But we found once again our assumption that we had conqured the hostile seas was flawed. Five people bitterly proved that there are some places humans have no business going...like the bottom of the Atlantic to stare at another example of human folly. And the very same shock has now descended as people contemplate how the very richest among us the very brightest could have placed themselves in harms way. Maybe the lesson of Titanic has not been learned. That we will never conquer our enviorment. That there are some places where human gall and hubris will not mitigate the risks. Yes we have a come a long way but so had the people in 1912. A wireless set that could send out a signal 2000 miles. A ship with electric bulkhead doors that could seal up on the flick of a swtich. Just the size of Titanic prohibited the idea of her sinking. But she did sink in less than three hours after hitting the iceberg and she settled to the ocean floor. She should have been a monnument to the idea of tempting fate to declaring all battles won with the planet and human supremacy allowing us to go wherever we want. But of course we ignored the biggest lesson of Titanic. Never assume anything.

The New York Road Not Taken

I never did go to New York. A young writer just out of college I stayed in Chicago although I had been to New York many times. I even went for a full week and stayed in Brooklyn right before Christmas and slogged around from one agent to another dropping off horrible manuscripts until one annoyed agent burst out, "this is not how its done." Nothing came of my week in New York and I went back to Chicago to be the struggling writer. But I am haunted by the might of been of going to NY. I should have. I should have taken my shot in the big apple. If for nothing else to see what would have happened. It is where you go when you are young and want to make it as an artist. I knew that every time I went there. This is where I should be. All the big writers it seemed were launched there. The brat pack of McInerny Brett Eastion Ellis were born there. That was my group. My time. But I didnt make the leap. I stayed in Chicago and cranked out my prose and sent three queries a week to NY publishers but never followed them. The letters came back and rejected all that I had sent them. And then of course I got married and had kids and that door closed. The window to go was when I was broke, hungry and desperate. Which was of course the reason I didnt go even though I do remember considering it and talking about it with friends and family but I never did it. The closest I would come would be the week I stayed there and long weekends where I caroused with friends who had moved to NY. Thinking back I could have easily proposed I move in with them, but I never did. And when I finally broke through and had a two book deal with Bantam and a big advance and a big agent I went to NY and had dinner with my publlisher and agent in an upper east side restaurant and then went out and got smashed and the next day walked Manhattan on a Sunday and bought two first edition Fitzgerald collections of short stories and then flew back home. And now twenty five books later one could make the case I did the right thing by staying put and producing the work. Some say NY is so hard that the creativity dries up with the struggle to survive. Some are crushed by the Big Apple. Many return with their tale between their legs. But others, others are launched into the stratosphere from that hot melting pot of creativity that is New York and end up in the stars. You never know, but I wish I had found out.

WRITING GATSBY

The Great Gatsby has sold 25 million copies worldwide and sells 500, 000 copies annually. The book has been made into three movies and produced for the theatre. It is considered the Greatest American Novel ever written. Yet, the story of how The Great Gatsby was written has not been told except as embedded chapters of much larger biographies. This story is one of heartbreak, infidelity, struggle, alcoholism, financial hardship, and one man’s perseverance to be faithful to the raw diamond of his talent in circumstances that would have crushed others. The story of the writing of The Great Gatsby is a story in itself. Fitzgerald had descended into an alcoholic run of parties on Great Neck, NY, where he and Zelda had taken a home. His main source of income was writing for the “slicks” or magazines of the day the main source being the Saturday Evening Post where Fitzgerald’s name on a story got him as high as four thousand dollars. Then on May 1, 1924, he, Zelda, and baby daughter Scottie quietly slipped away from New York on a “dry” steamer to France, the writer in search of sobriety, sanity, and his muse, resulting on the publication of The Great Gatsby a year later.