Robb White - "A Writer's Writer"

"A Writer's Writer"

White was determined to be a writer from the age of 13. While working for DuPont, he returned home each day and wrote from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. In 1931, he quit DuPont after selling his first story to American Boy for $100.

"A writer's writer, White truly lived his trade". He produced numerous articles and stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and Boys' Life, as well as the Naval Institute's Proceedings and various risqué publications; as he told interviewer Tom Weaver, "I wrote as a woman for True Stories and got raped in a hayloft about once a month"

White also wrote for TV, including "Men of Annapolis" and "Silent Service" (both 1957), plus episodes of Perry Mason (1961–1965). In the late 1950s and early 1960s he teamed with horror film director William Castle, best known for gimmicks such as a free "ghost viewer" and a vibrating electrical device mounted beneath the theater seats.

White and Castle turned out five films: Macabre, 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, The Tingler, and House on Haunted Hill — the last two featuring Vincent Price.

Despite all this, White is best known for his 24 novels. The early Run Masked (1938) was White's only effort at a work of adult-themed literature. Most of his books are adventure stories aimed at younger readers — including The Lion's Paw (1946), Deathwatch (1972), Up Periscope (1956) (filmed with James Garner in 1959), Flight Deck (1961), Torpedo Run (1962), and The Survivor (1964). The last four of these — and many others — are set in the same Pacific Theater where White served during World War II. Others — Lion's Paw, plus the rarer Sail Away (1948), Three Against the Sea (1940), and Smuggler's Sloop (1937) — feature youthful protagonists working together against the elements.

"White is on record saying that young people appreciate his work most. He attributed this to their good, decent and courageous nature — exactly the kind of people about whom he enjoyed writing. White confided to Something About the Author that he liked stories which dealt with ordinary people who survived in the face of terrible hardship ... White's work is typically hero-driven, a characteristic that emerges most clearly in Deathwatch where the protagonist battles not only his human persecutor, but the impersonal harshness of the American desert ... "

Several of his novels were popularized in the school-based Scholastic book-sale program in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s; now out of print, these 50-cent paperbacks currently sell for up to $50 on the Internet; rarer White hardbacks can fetch ten times that amount.

To the delight of White fans everywhere, in October 2008, a facsimile edition of The Lion's Paw was published by A. W. INK, a private company run by White's widow, Annie, and her daughter; it includes the same dust jacket as the original 1946 edition, along with the novel's original illustrations by Ralph Ray. This long-unavailable book can now be readily purchased at a variety of Internet sites.