In Philip Wylie's forty-eight years as a professional writer, he published over sixteen million words--an astounding output that includes at least fifty serialized novels and novelettes and almost as many works--fiction and nonfiction--in hardcover, along with hundreds of short stories and essays, poems, and speeches. Wylie consciously followed two parallel occupations--as a "serious" writer and as a "popular" one who earned his living entirely by free-lancing. Consequently, he became known for widely different--and often simultaneous--accomplishments.

He was, in the 1920s, acclaimed by astute reviewers as a promising young novelist, one who surpassed expectations with Finnley Wren in 1934. By contrast, throughout the 1930s and early 1940s he was one of the most highly paid contributors to Redbook, American, and the Saturday Evening Post, magazines that printed his high-quality murder mysteries, romantic love stories, and the famed Crunch and Des tales of deep-sea fishing. Then, after Generation of Vipers (1942), An...