Dead Air

Orson Welles may be best known for his film Citizen Kane, but a much earlier outing in his career led to the opportunity to make such an artistically ambitious undertaking. Hazelgrove charts Welles’ rise from a hectic childhood to the anointed genius of stage, radio, and, eventually, film. But it was the night before Halloween in 1938 when Welles’ bombastic radioplay rendition of H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds, styled as a breaking-news report, caused an uproar. Arriving at a nexus point when Americans began not only to rely on the relatively new invention of radio for entertainment but also as a trusted news source, the radioplay brought many who were listening to the brink of madness, wholly believing that aliens had actually touched down in a New Jersey town. Suicides, car accidents, and general unrest swept the country, and, at show’s end, Welles could only wonder if his career (and even freedom) was over too. Hazelgrove’s feverishly focused retelling of the broadcast as well as the fallout makes for a propulsive read as a study of both a cultural moment of mass hysteria and the singular voice at its root. * Booklist, Starred Review *
In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove 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. * Publishers Weekly *
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…. 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. * The Wall Street Journal *
Provides an adept retelling of a famous and poorly understood episode in American life. The relevance to our era is easy to see, and the author has enough faith in his readers to allow them for the most part to draw their own conclusions … The debates of the time about the responsibilities of broadcasters and the role of the government will be familiar to modern readers. * The American Conservative *

William Elliott Hazelgrove is the national bestselling author of ten novels and thirteen narrative nonfiction titles. His books have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist and have been optioned for movies. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace. He has written articles and reviews for USA Today, The Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications and has been featured on NPR All Things. The New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, CSPAN, and USA Today have all covered his books with features.

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