Uolter Tevis

Walter Tevis (full name — Walter Stone Tevis, sometimes given with the suffix jr.) was an American writer, the author of novels and short stories. Several well-known films were based on his books.

Tevis was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in the Sunset District, near the seashore and the famous Golden Gate Park. When he was ten, his parents had to place him for a year in the Stanford Children’s Sanatorium and themselves move to Madison County, Kentucky, where the family received a plot of land. When Walter turned eleven, he traveled by train across the country to join his relatives.

At the end of World War II, seventeen-year-old Tevis served in the Pacific as a carpenter’s assistant aboard the U.S. Navy ship Hamilton. After being discharged in 1945, he finished high school and enrolled at the University of Kentucky, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature. He studied under A.B. Guthrie, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Big Sky. During his studies, Tevis worked part-time in a billiard hall and even wrote a billiards story for Guthrie’s class.

After graduating from university, Tevis worked for Kentucky’s road department and taught a wide range of subjects—from the natural sciences and English to physical education—in rural schools in the state. In 1957 he married Jamie Griggs, with whom he lived for twenty-seven years.

After the billiards story “The Big Hustle,” published in Collier’s in 1955, Tevis had stories published in Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Galaxy Science Fiction, Playboy, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Tevis’s first novel, The Hustler, was published in 1959. It was followed in 1963 by The Man Who Fell to Earth. From 1965 to 1978, Tevis taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University.

Three of Tevis’s six novels were adapted into films of the same name. The film duology The Hustler and The Color of Money tells the story of the adventures of the fictional billiards hustler Felson, nicknamed Fast Eddie. The Man Who Fell to Earth was adapted in 1976 by director Nicolas Roeg, and also in