# Author! Author

Networks named by its archives: Mutual. Heard 1939. 2 episodes.

AUTHOR! AUTHOR! Published fiction writers appear on a radio show where the unusual ending of a possible story is shared, and the task of these authors is to spontaneously come up with an inventive and creative story that explain how it is possible to arrive at this surprising ending. ============ As described in an article by Francis M. Nevins and Martin Grams, Jr. Fred Dannay and Manny Lee were the creators of the fictional detective Ellery Queen. A little more than two months before the Ellery Queen series debuted, Dannay and Lee became involved in another radio venture which to the end of his life, Fred Dannay believed to be one of the most fascinating experiments in the medium’s history. Author! Author! was an impromptu melange of game and panel show which the cousins created and sold to the Mutual network. It debuted on April 7, 1939 under the sponsorship of the B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company and with Robert Lewis Shayon as director. The moderator for the series was humorist S.J. Perelman, although light-verse wizard Ogden Nash took Perelman’s place one week. Dannay and Lee, billed respectively as “Mr. Ellery” and “Mr Queen,” served as permanent panelists, and the guests each week were media figures like Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, Mark and Carl Van Doren, Fannie Hurst, Erskine Caldwell and Quentin Reynolds. The format of the program was described by the announcer as: “a fiction funfest.” Each week’s show would begin with a…

## Sets

- Author! Author! (Old Time Radio): the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it. Source: https://archive.org/details/author-author

## Episodes, in broadcast order

1. [The One Dollar Watch](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/radio-drama/series/author-author/c20540a6a86d), aired 1 January 1939 (25 min): https://archive.org/download/author-author/Author%21%20Author%21%2039-01-01%20The_One_Dollar_Watch%20%28First%20Episode%29.mp3
1. [The One Hundred Book Purchase](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/radio-drama/series/author-author/d2f36e10dee7), aired 9 October 1939 (30 min): https://archive.org/download/author-author/Author%21%20Author%21%2039-10-09%20The_One_Hundred_Book_Purchase.mp3

From the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive, uploaded by the collector named.

Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is.