George R. Stewart

George Rippey Stewart Jr. (May 31, 1895 – August 22, 1980) was an American historian, toponymist, novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1959 book, Pickett's Charge, a detailed history of the final attack at the Battle of Gettysburg, was termed "essential for an understanding of the Battle of Gettysburg". His 1949 post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951.

Early life and university career
Stewart was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, to engineer George Rippey Stewart Sr., who designed gasworks and electric railways and later became a citrus "rancher" in Southern California, and Ella Wilson Stewart. The younger Stewart earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1917, an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University in 1922. He accepted a job with the English department at Berkeley in 1923. After his father died, he stopped using the "Jr." with his name.

Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956–57. He once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names On The Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on names: A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names On The Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works concerning the poetic meter of ballads (published using the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important.

Works
As an author, Stewart's output was at once diverse, original, and important. Ordeal by Hunger, Pickett's Charge, and other works are examinations of American history, but are unusual for their concern with the interaction of human beings with their physical and social environments.

His greatest achievement as a novelist, Earth Abides, has somewhat the same perspective, but in the context of a destruction of civilization, in which everything formerly taken for granted about civilization and the situation of human beings in their environment can no longer be assumed. This radically altered circumstance permitted Stewart to examine issues rarely examined by other novelists.

East Of Giants is historical fiction. Man, An Autobiography is one of the very few works of speculative anthropology, in which he attempts to deduce how major developments of prehistorical civilization must have happened, and also offers a wealth of original and interesting insights into the character of early civilization. Good Lives provides a series of biographical sketches with the purpose of determining what it is that makes for a good life, having much in common with, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Not So Rich As You Think (1968) was a prescient early essay in environmentalism (Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been published only a few years earlier, in 1962, and had a more specific emphasis).

Storm (1941) uses an immense storm as its protagonist, an extraordinary departure in itself, and again describes the consequences for human beings of this large-scale environmental disruption. Other works, such as Names On The Land and American Ways of Life offer other unique insights.

Years of the City is flawed somewhat by relatively poor characterization, but is among his most ambitious books thematically, as it is concerned with the factors that result in the development and decay of civilizations – a topic only someone as well-versed in history as Stewart could discuss successfully. A number of trends in contemporary America can be recognized as being among those resulting in decay. Indeed, in a sense, The Years of the City is even more prescient than, say, Orwell's 1984.

Considered together, this body of work addresses topics found elsewhere mainly in authors like Arnold J. Toynbee, Ariel Durant, and Carroll Quigley, but in a more accessible form. Achievements of this nature might have earned Stewart a lasting reputation as one of America's greatest writers and men of letters. However, his work was not known well during his lifetime, and is now almost forgotten. Earth Abides was re-issued in 2020 with an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson.

He is known presently primarily for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the inaugural International Fantasy Award for fiction in 1951. It was dramatized by the radio program Escape and served as an inspiration for Stephen King's The Stand, as King has stated. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction terms it "one of the finest of all Post-Holocaust/Ruined Earth novels".

His 1941 novel Storm, featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm named "Maria," which inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon.

Storm was dramatized as A Storm Called Maria on the November 2, 1959, episode of ABC's anthology television series Walt Disney Presents. Co-produced by Ken Nelson Productions, it blended newsreel footage of several different storms to represent the mega-storm of the novel and traced the storm from its origins in Japan to the coast of California. The cast included non-actors, among them the dam superintendent George Kritsky, the telephone lineman Walt Bowen, and the highway superintendent Leo Quinn.

Another novel, Fire (1948), and a historical work, Ordeal By Hunger (1936), also evoked environmental catastrophes.

Audio

 * OTR Network Library: Escape: "Earth Abides", parts one and two
 * Two short radio episodes from Storm (1941): "Valley Rain" and "Final Success". California Legacy Project.