Richard Burton Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013) was an American author and screenwriter, who worked primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. Matheson is best known as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 science fiction horror novel that has been adapted for the screen three times. Matheson himself was co-writer of the first film version, The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was released in 1964. The other two adaptations were The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith. Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "Little Girl Lost" and "Steel", as well as several adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for Roger Corman and American International Pictures – House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror and The Raven. He adapted his 1971 short story "Duel" as a screenplay, directed by Steven Spielberg as the television film of the same name that year. In addition to I Am Legend and Duel, nine more of Matheson's novels and short stories have been adapted into films: The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man), Hell House (filmed as The Legend of Hell House), What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time), A Stir of Echoes, Steel (filmed as Real Steel), Button, Button (filmed as The Box), Ride the Nightmare (filmed as Cold Sweat), and Someone Is Bleeding (filmed as Les Seins de glace (Icy Breasts)). Both Steel and Button, Button had previously been episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Early life Matheson was born in Allendale, New Jersey, to Norwegian immigrants Bertolf and Fanny Matheson. They divorced when he was eight, and he was raised in Brooklyn, New York by his mother. His early writing influences were the film Dracula (1931), novels by Kenneth Roberts, and a poem which he read in the Brooklyn Eagle, where he published his first short story at age eight. He entered Brooklyn Technical High School in 1939, graduated in 1943, and served with the Army in Europe during World War II; this formed the basis for his 1960 novel The Beardless Warriors. Following his discharge, he received his undergraduate degree (via the G.I. Bill) from the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in 1949 before moving to California.
Career
1950s and 1960s Matheson's first-written novel, Hunger and Thirst, was ignored by publishers for several decades before eventually being published in 2010, but his short story "Born of Man and Woman" was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction's summer 1950 issue, the new quarterly's third issue, and attracted attention. It is the tale of a monstrous child chained by its parents in the cellar, written in the form of the creature's diary and using non-idiomatic English. Later that year, Matheson placed stories in the first and third issues of Galaxy Science Fiction, a new monthly. His first anthology of work was published in 1954. Between 1950 and 1971, he produced dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres. Matheson was a member of the "Southern California Sorcerers" group in the 1950s and 1960s, an informal collective of West Coast-based writers which included Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, George Clayton Johnson, William F. Nolan, Jerry Sohl, and others; collectively, these writers shared an affinity for an allegorically numinous storytelling approach that bridged the heretofore persistent lacuna between the relatively cloistered, professionally interlocked world of print science fiction (and such critical derivations as contemporaneous amateur press association-oriented science fiction fandom) with the "mainstream" New York City-based publishing industry (in particular, Bradbury was championed by the likes of Christopher Isherwood and Truman Capote) and the broader milieux of film and television (culminating in their recognition as a kind of informal brain trust retained by creator/showrunner Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone). Matheson's first novel to be published, Someone Is Bleeding, appeared from Lion Books in 1953. In the 1950s, he published a handful of Western stories (later collected in By the Gun), and in the 1990s, he published Western novels such as Journal of the Gun Years, The Gunfight, The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok, and Shadow on the Sun. Matheson's other early novels include The Shrinking Man (1956, filmed in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man, again from Matheson's own screenplay, and in 2025 as L'Homme qui rétrécit [fr]) and a science fiction vampire novel, I Am Legend (1954, filmed as The Last Man on Earth in 1964, The Omega Man in 1971, and I Am Legend in 2007). In 1960, Matheson published The Beardless Warriors, a non-fantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II. It was filmed in 1967 as The Young Warriors, though most of Matheson's plot was jettisoned. Matheson wrote teleplays for several television programs, including the Westerns Cheyenne, Have Gun – Will Travel, and Lawman. He also wrote the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within" (1966). However, he is most closely associated with the American TV series The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote more than a dozen episodes, including "Steel" (1963), "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963), "Little Girl Lost" (1962), and "Death Ship" (1963). For all of his Twilight Zone scripts, Matheson wrote the introductory and closing statements spoken by creator Rod Serling. He adapted five works of Edgar Allan Poe for Roger Corman's Poe series, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Raven (1963). He was one of the key screenwriters in Corman's career. For Hammer Film Productions, Matheson wrote the screenplay for Fanatic (1965; US title: Die! Die! My Darling!), starring Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers and based on the novel Nightmare by Anne Blaisdell; he also adapted for Hammer Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out (1968).
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