Earl Hamner

Earl Hamner

Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow
By James E. Person Jr.
Cumberland House

Once immensely popular, TV’s The Waltons is sometimes recalled by today’s cynics as an overly idyllic portrait of characters too optimistic to be believed. But in fact, the series closely paralleled the early life of its creator and his family. From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow traces Hamner’s Depression-era upbringing and its effect on his prolific career. It explores his fascinating contradictions: an impoverished but happy childhood in rural Virginia, followed by a move to opulent Los Angeles, where he also conceived the salacious prime-time soap series Falcon Crest. (Hamner once joked that the fashionable decadence of Falcon Crest represented his "wicked side," noting the disparity between the famous TV creations that became his signature.) But as this biography deftly demonstrates, what all his works have in common is a mark of the enduring family values he clearly holds so dear.

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