Background
He was born on December. 25, 1924 in Syracuse, New York, United States, the son of Samuel Lawrence Serling, a butcher, and Esther Cooper.
He was born on December. 25, 1924 in Syracuse, New York, United States, the son of Samuel Lawrence Serling, a butcher, and Esther Cooper.
He attended public schools in Binghamton, New York, graduating in 1942. After World War II, he enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, under the GI Bill. He majored first in physical education, but soon switched to English literature and drama. He graduated from Antioch with a B. A. in June 1950 more determined than ever to be a script writer.
Enlisting in the army as a paratrooper, he served three years in the Pacific theater and was severely wounded in the Philippines.
Serling's first taste of success was as an amateur boxer. He won seventeen of his eighteen military bouts, getting his nose broken on one occasion. He fought in the Golden Gloves and was runner-up in the featherweight division championships.
Serling took work-study jobs at a local radio station and began turning out scripts. In his senior year, Serling won second prize, including an all-expenses-paid trip for him and his wife to New York City, in a script-writing contest sponsored by CBS.
But after failing to sell his first forty free-lance scripts, Serling was forced to look for a salaried job. He worked first as a script writer for radio station WLW, then moved to WKRC-TV, both in Cincinnati. He earned $60 per week as a continuity writer and produced scripts for locally shown dramas. During this period, Serling's free-lance efforts finally began to pay off with the sale of five radio scripts, including two to the "Grand Central Station" program on CBS radio.
His breakthrough came in 1951 when the "Lux Video Theatre" series bought a script for a TV drama. He eventually sold ten more to the show. By the spring of 1953, Serling was earning enough to quit his regular job. A year later he moved to Westport, Connecticut, so that he could be closer to New York City. Serling had already sold some ninety scripts when "Patterns, " a one-hour drama about life in the top echelons of big business, aired January 12, 1955, on NBC's "Kraft Television Theatre. " Its success led NBC to stage the drama again a month later, the first such repeat in television history. He won his first Emmy and adapted the play for filming by United Artists. The movie was released in March 1956 to mixed reviews.
In April 1955 Serling signed a deal with CBS-TV and his scripts were selling as fast as he could turn them out. In all, twenty Serling dramas aired in 1955, not all to critical acclaim. To keep up his prolific output, he abandoned typewriters in favor of tape recorders, usually working from 8:00 A. M. to noon.
As the golden age of television came to a close, Serling found himself becoming disenchanted with the medium because of frequent clashes with censors. His Emmy-winning script about lynch mobs, "A Town Has Turned to Dust, " went through extensive revisions before it was accepted in 1958. "I simply got tired of battling, " he said in 1959.
Serling decided to switch directions. Now living in California, he formed his own TV production company in Hollywood. In 1959 he created the series for which he became most famous: "The Twilight Zone. " The show ran for five years. Many famous actors appeared in the show, including Robert Redford and Cliff Robertson, but the main focus was always the offbeat story, usually with an ironic ending.
In 1965 Serling was elected to a two-year term as head of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He coauthored the screenplay for Planet of the Apes, which appeared in 1968. In 1970 he created another television series of macabre tales, "Night Gallery. "
His final years were spent teaching. He became a professor of dramatic writing at Ithaca College and moved to Interlaken, New York. In a 1974 speech to the college's School of Communications.
Serling had a minor heart attack in May 1975 and was hospitalized for two weeks. He underwent open-heart surgery the following month and died two days later at a Rochester, New York, hospital.
(Living Doll starring Tim Kazurinsky; Big Tall Wish starri...)
He converted from Judaism to Unitarianism in college.
He criticized the commercialism of the film and television industry and "our deadening and deadly lack of creativity and courage. How do you put on a meaningful drama or documentary that is adult, incisive, probing, when every 15 minutes the proceedings are interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits with toilet paper?"
Quotations: "There was a time when I wanted to reform television, " he said in a 1970 interview. "Now I accept it for what it is. So long as I don't write beneath myself or pander my work, I'm not doing anyone a disservice. "
He was a small man at five feet five inches. An intense individual who had trouble sleeping, he told friends he got some of his best ideas lying awake in bed. He was a heavy smoker.
Quotes from others about the person
The New York Times critic wrote, "Serling has given us a creative, frightening, and often moving portrait of familiar and rare executives caught in mahogany-paneled 'jungles' with their teeth, hearts and minds bared. "
In 1948 he married a fellow Antioch student, Carolyn Kramer. They had two daughters, Jodi and Anne.