Serling

From New York Times bestselling author and esteemed TV critic Alan Sepinwall, whose writing has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New York Times, comes the definitive biography of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Serling’s pioneering work not only included entertaining millions and shaping television standards, but also being an outspoken advocate on a range of social justice issues.

“What I write is a part of me,” Rod Serling once said. Where some writers are chameleons who can disappear into someone else’s perspective and persona, Serling put himself into everything he wrote. You could hear his distinct voice coming through whether a script was set on another planet or a familiar suburban street. Many of the hundreds of original radio and television scripts that he penned in his five decades were in some way inspired by moments from his own life: his idyllic childhood, his time in combat in the Pacific, the period in his early career where he earned a reputation as Hollywood’s “angry young man,” and even his experiences as the famed screenwriter, producer and narrator of The Twilight Zone. 

So it seems fitting that the definitive biography of a man who poured so much of himself into his writing should be told in his own words. In SERLING, renowned TV critic and bestselling author Alan Sepinwall employs Rod’s own writing to paint a portrait of this singular storyteller, using episodes of The Twilight Zone and Rod’s other work to set the scene and illustrate how thin the line was between the man and his art. There were parts of himself that Rod would rarely speak about openly — his time serving in World War II in particular — yet thinly-disguised versions of them inevitably found their way into his work, often many times over. Sepinwall has created a revealing portrait of a complicated, principled man, paying due homage to perhaps one of the greatest activist writers ever known.