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George Rippey Stewart (May 31, 1895 – 1980) was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley (until 1962). Born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Stewart was educated at Princeton University, the University of California, and Columbia University.
He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and is the obvious inspiration for Stephen King's The Stand.
His 1941 novel Storm, featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called "Maria," prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon. Storm was dramatized as A Storm Called Maria on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland.
Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956–1957, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names.
Bibliography
- Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party (1936)
- Storm (1941)
- Names on the Land (1945), a study on the etymology of American place-names
- Man, An Autobiography (1946)
- Fire (1948)
- Earth Abides (1949)
- U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America (1953)
- American Ways of Life (1954)
- Pickett's Charge (1959)
- The California Trail (1962)
- Not So Rich as You Think (1968)
- A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970)
- Names on the Globe (1975)
Reference
- "George R. Stewart, toponymist," Names, Volume 24, 1976, pp. 77-85.
Listen to
External links
- American Name Society biography of Stewart by William Bright
- Donald M. Scott: "George R. Stewart: The Man Who Named the Wind"
American academics | American novelists | American science fiction writers | American non-fiction writers | Toponymists | 1895 births | 1980 deaths
"George R. Stewart"