Earl Hamner Jr., Who Created ‘The Waltons,’ Dies at 92 (Published 2016) (2024)

Earl Hamner Jr., who drew on warm memories of his Depression childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to create the enormously popular 1970s television series “The Waltons,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 92.

The cause was bladder cancer, his daughter, Caroline Hamner, said.

Mr. Hamner was a novelist and television writer with eight episodes of “The Twilight Zone” to his credit when, in 1971, he took an incident from his novel of a decade earlier, “Spencer’s Mountain,” and rewrote it as a television special.

“The Homecoming: A Christmas Story,” about a close-knit mountain family waiting for the arrival of their father on Christmas Eve in 1933, drew strong ratings, and CBS picked it up as a series, “The Waltons,” with Mr. Hamner credited as creator and executive producer.

Because it was scheduled in the same time slot as “The Flip Wilson Show” on NBC, many CBS executives predicted a quick death, but viewers loved the clan — John-Boy, played by Richard Thomas, was based on Mr. Hamner — and its simple values of hard work and family unity. Mr. Hamner wrote only a few episodes of the series but was closely involved in creative decisions and provided the voice-over narration that began and ended each show.

“The Waltons,” first broadcast in September 1972, won six Emmy Awards for its first season. It ran for nine years and more than 200 episodes, carrying the family’s story forward from 1933 to 1946. It lived on for decades thereafter in several specials that reassembled most of the original cast, including “A Walton Wedding” (1995) and “A Walton Easter” (1997).

Earl Henry Hamner Jr. was born on July 10, 1923, in Schuyler, Va., the oldest of eight children. The family home had no telephone and only two books: a Bible and a beekeeping manual.

Earl Sr. worked for a company that mined and milled soapstone. When it failed during the Depression, he took a job at a DuPont factory 40 miles away. Every weekend, he walked six miles from the nearest bus station, in Hickory Creek, to see his family, a trek that inspired the Christmas Eve episode in “Spencer’s Mountain.”

Mr. Hamner’s mother, the former Doris Giannini, was descended from Italian immigrants who arrived in the area in the 19th century.

When Earl Jr. was 6, The Richmond Times-Dispatch published his poem “My Dog.” This, he later said, set him on the path to becoming a writer.

After the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the Army in his sophom*ore year at the University of Richmond, which he had been attending on a scholarship. Trained to defuse land mines, he was sent to France after the Normandy invasion. There, a superior officer found out that he could type and assigned him to the Quartermaster Corps.

While stationed in Paris, Mr. Hamner, inspired by his discovery of Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and other American novelists, began writing fiction, including the first pages of what would become “Spencer’s Mountain,” about a man who dreams of building his wife a house on family land. The novel was published in 1961 with an admiring blurb from Harper Lee. A film version, with Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, was later released.

Mr. Hamner earned a degree in broadcast communications from the University of Cincinnati in 1948 and began working at the Cincinnati radio station WLW, a job he soon quit to work on his first published novel, “Fifty Roads to Town,” about a revival preacher whose arrival in a small Appalachian town creates havoc. It was published in 1953, by which time Mr. Hamner had moved to New York and found work writing radio and television scripts for NBC.

In 1954, he married Jane Martin, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who survives him. In addition to his daughter, he is also survived by a son, Scott; a brother, Paul; and two sisters, Audrey Hamner and Nancy Jameson.

Mr. Hamner moved to California in 1962 and got his first break when “The Twilight Zone” accepted two of his story ideas. His eight scripts for the series included “The Hunt,” about a man who is dead but does not realize it until his hunting dog prevents him from wandering into hell, and “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” in which the main characters turn out to be pets on an alien planet.

“My mother-in-law found them downright weird,” Mr. Hamner said of his “Twilight Zone” scripts in a 2008 commencement address at the University of Cincinnati. “After she had watched four or five of my stories, she wrote my wife a note saying, ‘I do hope that Earl is not smoking any of that awful green stuff.’”

Mr. Hamner turned his hand to a variety of projects. Before hitting it big with “The Waltons,” he wrote episodes for “Wagon Train,” “Gentle Ben” and “Nanny and the Professor” as well as the 1968 television version of “Heidi” and the 1963 movie “Palm Springs Weekend,” with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens.

While working on “The Waltons,” he wrote scripts for the animated film “Charlotte’s Web” (1973), adapted from the children’s book by E. B. White, and for “Where the Lilies Bloom” (1974), a film based on Vera and Bill Cleaver’s young-adult novel about a family of orphans in Appalachia.

“I feel like, as a professional writer, I can write anything,” Mr. Hamner told the magazine Virginia Living in 2013. “I once said, ‘In my career, I have written everything but matchbook covers.’”

After “The Waltons” was canceled, he developed the series “Falcon Crest,” a soap opera set in California wine country that ran from 1981 to 1990. He left after the fifth season and formed a television production company with Don Sipes, a suspense writer with whom he wrote the novel “Murder in Tinseltown.”

“What has inspired my work has always been the family and neighbors I grew up with back in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Mr. Hamner said in his commencement address. “They were decent, God-fearing, patriotic people. Like most Appalachian folk, they were frugal, proud and self-reliant.

“To write about such people, it was inevitable that such stories deal with love and honor, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice. And so much of my writing became a celebration of those traditional American values.”