Works by
Philip Wylie
(aka Leatrice Homesley, Philip Gordon Wylie)
(Writer)
[1902 - 1971]

Writing as Leatrice Homesley

• Blondy's Boy Friend: A Love Story (1930)

Writing as Philip Wylie

Fiction

• Heavy Laden (1928)

• Gladiator (1930)
  With Burrough's Mars series, Wylie's Hugo Danner is generally credited as the ancestor of both Clark Kent and Clark Savage, Jr. Danner, the product of a strength serum given to his mother during pregnancy, is able to lift 4,000 pounds, leap 40 feet in the air, and so forth. Unlike Superman and Doc Savage, however, Danner is never happy with his skills, hating the isolation and at times using his strength for monetary gain. Also, you can't imagine Doc Savage spending his summer after freshman year the way Danner did.

• The Murderer Invisible (1931)
  Two lovers rush toward doom, as an unseen killer stalks the world.  A novel of the fourth dimension's conquest of earth.

• The Savage Gentleman (1932)

• When Worlds Collide (1933) with Edwin Balmer
  A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.
  
  A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time.
  Movie (When Worlds Collide, 1951) Rudolph Maté, director with Barbara Rush and Richard Derr  DVD, VHS

• After Worlds Collide (1934) with Edwin Balmer

• Night Unto Night (1944)

• Opus 21 (1949)

• The Disappearance (1951)
  On a lazy, quiet afternoon, in the blink of an eye, our world shatters into two parallel universes as men vanish from women and women from men. After families and loved ones separate from one another, life continues in very different ways for men and women, boys and girls. An explosion of violence sweeps one world that still operates technologically; social stability and peace in the other are offset by famine and a widespread breakdown in machinery and science. And as we learn from the fascinating parallel stories of a brilliant couple, Bill and Paula Gaunt, the foundations of relationships, love, and sex are scrutinized, tested, and sometimes redefined in both worlds. The radically divergent trajectories of the gendered histories reveal stark truths about the rigidly defined expectations placed on men and women and their sexual relationships and make clear how much society depends on interconnection between the sexes.

• The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951)

• Tomorrow! (1954)

• Answer (1955)

• They Both Were Naked (1962)

• Triumph (1963)
  The United States of America was obliterated as a nation of cities and burned to death, after that, in all main urban areas -- then, smothered, the same night in a death-blanket which could be escaped only in the most elaborately prepared shelters.

• The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise (1969)

• The End of the Dream (1972)

Non-fiction

• Generation of Vipers (1942)
  Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion. Generation of Vipers ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the American character and malaise. Wylie's classic, written with devastating wit and a pen as sharp as a barber's razor, wages war on all forms of American hypocrisy. Remarkably, or perhaps not so, what Philip Wylie has to say rings as rue today as when he first wrote Vipers in 1942, and no doubt it will continue to offend and outrage both the Left and Right. Harsh, bitter, and filled with venom toward those who have corrupted the America that "could have been," Generation of Vipers will be read with pleasure and indignation a century from now.

• Essay on Morals (1947)

• The Magic Animal: Mankind Revisited (1968)