Earl Hamner Jr., the Virginia-born writer who created not only TV’s folksy, Depression-era family drama “The Waltons” but the California wine country prime-time soap opera “Falcon Crest,” died Thursday. He was 92.
In a long career that included writing episodes of “The Twilight Zone” in the 1960s and adapting the E.B. White classic “Charlotte’s Web” for a 1973 animated film, Hamner was best known for tapping his childhood memories of growing up in a large family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression.
“Spencer’s Mountain,” Hamner’s childhood-inspired 1961 novel, was turned into a 1963 movie starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara.
His 1970 book “The Homecoming: A Novel About Spencer’s Mountain,” inspired by Christmas Eve 1933 when Hamner’s father was late in arriving home, was turned into “The Homecoming: A Christmas Story,” a two-hour CBS television movie that introduced the family, renamed the Waltons, to television viewers in December 1971.
Its success led to the weekly hourlong TV series.
In a 1973 interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, Hamner said he thought “people are hungry for a sense of security. They’re hungry, too, for real family relationships — not just rounding up the family for a cookout but real togetherness where people are relating honestly."
Expanding on his feeling that there was “a need” for the Waltons in contemporary American society, Hamner wrote in a 1972 guest column for The Times: “Audiences in all entertainment media have been brutalized by crudities, vulgarity, violence, indifference and ineptitude.”
With “The Waltons,” he wrote, “we are attempting to make an honest, positive statement on the affirmation of man.”
While still overseeing “The Waltons,” Hamner created “Falcon Crest,” which debuted on CBS in 1981 and ran until 1990.
The hourlong drama set in the fictitious Tuscany Valley in California starred Jane Wyman as the powerful and manipulative Falcon Crest winery owner and family matriarch Angela Channing and Robert Foxworthy as her nephew, Chase Gioberti.
After leaving “Falcon Crest” after the fifth season, Hamner formed a production company with TV executive and novelist Don Snipes, whose programs included “Snowy River: The McGregor Saga,” an hourlong series that ran on the Family Channel from 1993 to 1996.
Hamner and Snipes also co-wrote the 2000 mystery novel “Murder in Tinseltown.”
Hamner’s credits include writing the 1963 movie “Palm Springs Weekend” and creating the short-lived TV series “Apples Way” in the 1970s and “Boone,” another short-lived series in the 1980s.
He also wrote the 1968 TV adaptation of “Heidi,” and 8 episodes of the Twilight Zone.
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