# Philip Wylie
**Philip Wylie** (Philip Gordon Wylie, 12 May 1902 – 25 October 1971) was an American author of novels, short fiction, screenplays, and social criticism who coined the term "Momism" in his bestseller *Generation of Vipers* (1942) and wrote the science fiction novels *Gladiator* (1930) and *When Worlds Collide* (1933, with Edwin Balmer).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born / died | 12 May 1902, Beverly, Massachusetts; 25 October 1971, Miami, Florida[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) |
| Signature sf novels | *Gladiator* (1930); *When Worlds Collide* (1933) and *After Worlds Collide* (1934), with Edwin Balmer[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) |
| Best-known nonfiction | *Generation of Vipers* (1942; revised 1955), source of the coinage "Momism"[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) |
| Sales of *Vipers* | First printing of 4,000 copies sold out in a week; 11 printings in 1943 alone; 180,000 hardcover copies sold by 1954[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) |
| Screenplays | *The Island of Lost Souls* (1932), *The King of the Jungle* (1933), *Murders in the Zoo* (1933)[3](https://people.uncw.edu/laudadion/pdf/wylie.pdf) |
| Estimated output | Nearly 50 million words over a freelance career begun in 1927[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) |
| Posthumous novel | *The End of the Dream* (1972), set in a 2023 devastated by ecological catastrophe[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) |
## Early life and start in writing
Wylie was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, the son of a Presbyterian minister and the novelist Edna Edwards Wylie, who died when he was five years old.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) He entered Princeton in 1920 on the condition that he enroll in courses in the biological and physical sciences, and he stayed current on developments in the sciences throughout his life; he left the university without graduating in 1923.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) He joined the first staff of [Harold Ross](https://www.edgepedia.org/harold-ross)'s newly founded *The New Yorker* in 1925, working in every phase of the magazine's production, and was dismissed two years later, after which he became a freelance writer.[3](https://people.uncw.edu/laudadion/pdf/wylie.pdf)
## *Gladiator* and the superhuman
Wylie's first novel of genre interest, *Gladiator* (1930; revised 1949), tells of a young man endowed in the womb with superhuman strength and near-invulnerability by his scientist father.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) The father, Abednego Danner, a biology professor, develops a serum tested on tadpoles and a cat before injecting his pregnant wife, and their son Hugo Danner grows up able to leap great heights and outrun trains; he tells his father, "I can do things, Dad ... I can jump higher'n a house. I can run faster'n a train. I'm like a man made out of iron."[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [4](https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/09/the-unfulfilled-superhero-philip-wylies-gladiator/)
The novel treats the gift as a burden rather than a triumph. Hugo tries money-making ventures, becomes a football star, fights in the First World War, and fails in his attempts to use his strength for reform; at the end, during a violent rainstorm, he challenges God aloud and is destroyed by lightning.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [4](https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/09/the-unfulfilled-superhero-philip-wylies-gladiator/) Reviews of the book have also noted its echoes of cosmic horror and its place at the boundary of scientific romance and early science fiction.[5](https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/3350/1/PhilipWyliesGladiatorAM_WILCOCK.pdf)
**Influence on the superhero.** *Gladiator* is closely associated with the origins of Superman, whose first appearance was in *Action Comics* #1 in 1938. [Jerry Siegel](https://www.edgepedia.org/jerry-siegel), Superman's co-creator, reviewed Wylie's novel in the second issue of his fanzine *Science-Fiction* (1932), and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states that *Gladiator* clearly influenced the creation of the comic-book superhero.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) However, the specific claims often repeated about the connection, that Siegel swiped dialogue from the novel or that Wylie threatened to sue, have been found to be untrue.[4](https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/09/the-unfulfilled-superhero-philip-wylies-gladiator/) Commentators have also seen Hugo Danner's experiences reflected, directly or indirectly, in later characters from [Spider-Man](https://www.edgepedia.org/spider-man) to Marvel's tortured mutants of the X-Men.[4](https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/09/the-unfulfilled-superhero-philip-wylies-gladiator/) • [5](https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/3350/1/PhilipWyliesGladiatorAM_WILCOCK.pdf) The novel was adapted as the film *The Gladiator* (1938), and [Marvel Comics](https://www.edgepedia.org/marvel-comics) adapted its first half in *Marvel Preview* #9 in 1976, with Roy Thomas writing; Thomas later used *Gladiator*'s public-domain status to make Hugo Danner the father of the character Iron Munro in DC's *Young All-Stars* in the 1980s.[6](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/04/philip-wylie-the-unsung-hero-of-super-heroes/)
## The 1930s: novels, screenplays, and worlds colliding
Through the early 1930s Wylie produced novels and screenplays at commercial pace. He wrote screenplays for *The Island of Lost Souls* (1932), adapted from [H. G. Wells](https://www.edgepedia.org/h-g-wells)'s *The Island of Doctor Moreau*, *The King of the Jungle* (1933), and *Murders in the Zoo* (1933).[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [3](https://people.uncw.edu/laudadion/pdf/wylie.pdf) His novel *The Murderer Invisible* (1931), inspired by Wells's *The Invisible Man*, served as the basis for Universal Studio's first attempts at a shooting script for the Wells novel, although the filmed version drew instead on the original tale.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) *The Savage Gentleman* (1932), in which a child raised in isolation on an island with traces of a lost world excoriates human society on first contact, has been cited as a precursor, if not an influence, on the pulp hero, and some similarities between its protagonist and [Doc Savage](https://www.edgepedia.org/doc-savage) have been noted.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip)
Of greater science fiction interest was the Bronson Beta sequence written with Edwin Balmer, the editor of *Redbook* magazine: *When Worlds Collide*, serialized in *Blue Book* from September 1932 to February 1933 and published in 1933, and its sequel *After Worlds Collide* (1934).[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) The novels retell the [Noah's Ark](https://www.edgepedia.org/noahs-ark) legend, with Earth destroyed and the protagonists escaping in a great spaceship; the serialization doubled the circulation of *The Blue Book Magazine*, and [Paramount Pictures](https://www.edgepedia.org/paramount-pictures) bought the film rights to both books.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) The first volume was filmed as *When Worlds Collide* (1951), produced by George Pal's company, an adaptation that helped sustain Wylie's popularity.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [7](https://www.hachette.co.uk/contributor/philip-wylie/) His most highly regarded single work, per the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, was the baroque novel *Finnley Wren* (1934), an anatomy of the young century embedding two tales of genre interest, "An Epistle to the Thessalonians" and "Epistle to the Galatians."[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip)
## *Generation of Vipers* and "Momism"
By World War Two Wylie was notorious for flamboyant but penetrating surveys of American mores, and in *Generation of Vipers* (1942; revised 1955) he attacked supposedly sacrosanct American beliefs and institutions, including organized religion, business, Congress, doctors, and the presumed goodness of the common man.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) The chapter "Common Women" gave the book its firestorm: it attacked Americans' sanctification of motherhood, a cultural syndrome Wylie called "Momism," meaning a tendency to sacralize motherhood in a way that made family dynamics and morality impenetrable to reflection.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers)
The book was a substantial bestseller. A first printing of 4,000 copies sold out in a week after an endorsement by the columnist [Walter Winchell](https://www.edgepedia.org/walter-winchell), it went through 11 printings in 1943 alone, and it had sold 180,000 hardcover copies by 1954; in 1950 the [American Library Association](https://www.edgepedia.org/american-library-association) named it one of the 50 most influential and important books of the previous 50 years.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) The book drew accusations of misogyny, which Wylie denied, and critics such as the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley later judged that its moment had passed.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) • [8](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2005/07/30/generation-of-vipers-loses-its-bite/2f0d832b-29e4-4d28-a2c1-e3479a9feefa/) For some years after publication Wylie was a sought-after commentator on American ills in magazines including *Cosmopolitan*, *Playboy*, and *Reader's Digest*.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers)
## Postwar science fiction: the nuclear and ecological apocalypses
Wylie returned to science fiction after World War Two with work increasingly dominated by apocalyptic themes. In "The Paradise Crater" (*Blue Book*, October 1945), which described a postwar 1965 threatened by a Nazi underground wielding atomic bombs, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction records that an earlier submission to *American Magazine* led to his being placed under house arrest for undue prescience.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip)
A series of novels followed. *The Disappearance* (1951) imagines the world splitting along gender lines; *The Answer* (1955) has US and Soviet atomic tests knocking angels out of the heavens; and the nuclear-war novels *Tomorrow!* (1954) and *Triumph* (1963) examined civil defense and superpower confrontation, the latter depicting a nuclear exchange that destroys the entire northern hemisphere.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) • [9](https://online.ucpress.edu/sfs/article-abstract/22/Part%202%20%2866%29/234/208266/The-Postwar-Jeremiads-of-Philip-Wylie?redirectedFrom=fulltext) The scholar David Seed, of the [University of Liverpool](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-liverpool), has described Wylie as drawing on secularized apocalyptic paradigms in these works, using disaster as a repeated test of American morale and preparedness.[9](https://online.ucpress.edu/sfs/article-abstract/22/Part%202%20%2866%29/234/208266/The-Postwar-Jeremiads-of-Philip-Wylie?redirectedFrom=fulltext) His final novels turned from atomic to ecological disaster: the television tie-in *Los Angeles: A.D. 2017* (1971) and the posthumously published *The End of the Dream* (1972), set in a 2023 devastated by environmental catastrophe linked to climate change.[1](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip) • [7](https://www.hachette.co.uk/contributor/philip-wylie/)
## Standing
Wylie wrote in nearly every genre, and his work has been roughly divided into four periods dominated respectively by science fiction, social criticism, nuclear war, and environmental destruction.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) He estimated his lifetime output at nearly 50 million words.[2](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers) After his death his reputation diminished sharply: commentators note that today he is read mainly by science fiction enthusiasts and for *Generation of Vipers* and its "Momism" coinage, even as *Gladiator* and *When Worlds Collide* remain his most culturally influential works.[8](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2005/07/30/generation-of-vipers-loses-its-bite/2f0d832b-29e4-4d28-a2c1-e3479a9feefa/) • [7](https://www.hachette.co.uk/contributor/philip-wylie/)
## References
1. [Wylie, Philip, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wylie_philip)
2. [Peter L. Winkler, "The Man Who Hated Moms: Looking Back on Philip Wylie's 'Generation of Vipers'", Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-who-hated-moms-looking-back-on-philip-wylies-generation-of-vipers)
3. [Nicholas Laudadio, "Philip Wylie", Dictionary of Literary Biography entry](https://people.uncw.edu/laudadion/pdf/wylie.pdf)
4. [Matthew David Surridge, "The Unfulfilled Superhero: Philip Wylie's Gladiator", Black Gate, 2013](https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/09/the-unfulfilled-superhero-philip-wylies-gladiator/)
5. [Sean Wilcock, "Philip Wylie's Gladiator: At the Crossroads of Scientific Romance, Weird Fiction, Superhero Comics and Science Fiction", British Fantasy Society Journal, 2016](https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/3350/1/PhilipWyliesGladiatorAM_WILCOCK.pdf)
6. [Troy Brownfield, "Philip Wylie: The Unsung Hero of Super-Heroes", The Saturday Evening Post, 2020](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/04/philip-wylie-the-unsung-hero-of-super-heroes/)
7. [Philip Wylie, contributor page, Hachette UK](https://www.hachette.co.uk/contributor/philip-wylie/)
8. [Jonathan Yardley, "'Generation of Vipers' Loses Its Bite", The Washington Post, 2005](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2005/07/30/generation-of-vipers-loses-its-bite/2f0d832b-29e4-4d28-a2c1-e3479a9feefa/)
9. [David Seed, "The Postwar Jeremiads of Philip Wylie", Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995)](https://online.ucpress.edu/sfs/article-abstract/22/Part%202%20%2866%29/234/208266/The-Postwar-Jeremiads-of-Philip-Wylie?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Writers and literary biographies › Fiction writers: novelists and genre › Science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers › Science fiction writers*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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