Earl Hamner Jr, who has died aged 92, created The Waltons, the hugely popular television series that ran for nine seasons from 1972. Set in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains during the Depression, and based on Hamner’s own childhood, The Waltons struck a sentimental chord with American audiences after the turbulent 1960s and was also a success with TV viewers worldwide. This nostalgia was emphasised by Hamner’s voice, whose comfortable tones introduced each episode, making the connection to the Walton family’s oldest son, the would-be writer John-Boy.
The show indeed mirrored Hamner’s life. He was born in Schuyler, Virginia, where his father, Earl Sr, was a soapstone miner, having abandoned tobacco farming in the James river valley. His mother, Doris (nee Giannini), was descended from an Italian immigrant who planted the vineyards in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate. When the mines in Schuyler closed down, Earl Sr found factory work 33 miles away, commuting weekly on buses, the nearest of which required a six-mile walk from the family’s home in the hills. That trek back, through snow on Christmas Eve 1933, became the basis of Hamner’s novel The Homecoming (1970), from which he developed the Waltons. But much of his other work also centres on extended families, often in rural and mountain settings.
Hamner’s writing career began with a poem, My Dog, published in a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, when he was six. He won a scholarship to the University of Richmond, but was drafted in 1943, and his typing skills eventually saw him assigned to the quartermasters corps, based in Paris after the D-day invasion. After his discharge he joined an apprentice writers’ programme at Richmond’s WMBG radio, then earned a degree in broadcasting from the University of Cincinnati and worked for the WLW radio station there. When both were winners in a script-writing contest, he met Rod Serling and when Hamner left WLW in 1949 to take a cabin in the Ozark mountains and work on a novel, he recommended Serling for his job.
In 1951 Hamner headed for New York, where he wrote for an NBC radio programme called Biography in Sound. Two years later the novel he had begun in the Ozarks, Fifty Roads to Town, was published. He was writing for the Today Show when, in 1954, he met and married Jane Martin, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar magazine. He then moved into television, writing an episode of the NBC drama Justice, which was called Hit and Run and starred EG Marshall.
The television business was moving from live programmes in New York to film produced in Los Angeles, so in 1961, after publication of his novel Spencer’s Mountain, another Waltons precursor, Hamner moved his family to California; his memoir, The Avocado Drive Zoo (1999) recalls the move. A film adaptation of Spencer’s Mountain, written and directed by Delmer Daves and starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, appeared in 1963, by which time Hamner was writing for many shows, including his old friend Serling’s brainchild, The Twilight Zone. One of his scripts, You Drive, was an adaptation of Hit and Run.
Hamner then wrote the beach-blanket farce Palm Springs Weekend (1963), published You Can’t Get There from Here (1965), and in 1968 scripted a television adaptation of Heidi, still infamous in the US because NBC cut off the final minutes of a crucial gridiron match to start its broadcast on schedule. He wrote for two series, Gentle Ben and Nanny and the Professor, before The Homecoming was broadcast as a Christmas special in 1971 and became a huge hit, leading to the debut of The Waltons as a series the next year. The commissioning of the first series seemed to go against the grain of the “rural purge” that the CBS network’s programme controller, Fred Silverman, had begun in 1970, dropping successful comedies and variety shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee Haw and The Jim Nabors Hour in pursuit of a younger audience.
Hamner wrote some episodes of The Waltons, but as its producer acted as what is now called the showrunner, maintaining creative control. He also wrote an excellent movie adaptation of the children’s novel Charlotte’s Web (1973), created the series Apple’s Way, which ran for four seasons from 1974, and scripted a number of TV movies including Lassie: A New Beginning (1978).
The Waltons ended its run in 1981 and Hamner moved seamlessly to a very different family saga, Falcon Crest, a Dallas-like tale of vicious infighting within a California wine-growing family inspired by his wife’s ancestors. Although it ran until 1990, Hamner left the show after five seasons; he had less control and did not like the direction in which it was going. His next series were less successful: Boone (1983), about a would-be cowboy, ran for one season, while Morningstar/Eveningstar, in which an orphanage merges with a retirement home, lasted for only seven shows in 1986.
Hamner narrated the first two Waltons specials, but was not involved in the ones that followed in the 1990s. He wrote further scripts for television movies, an adaptation of Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (1997), A Mother’s Gift (1995) and The Night Before Christmas: A Mouse Tale (2002), plus episodes of Snowy River and the animated series The Wild Thornberrys. With Don Sipes he wrote a Hollywood mystery novel, Murder in Tinseltown (2000), and with Ralph Giffin a book about The Waltons, Goodnight John-Boy (2002). A memoir, Generous Women, appeared in 2006.
Hamner is survived by Jane, by their two children, Scott and Caroline, by a brother, Paul, and by two sisters, Audrey and Nancy.
