The first one I can think of is Delos W. Lovelace’s* novelization of King Kong, which is still being printed (and gets a boost whenever any Kong movie comes out) Are there any earlier examples?
The next one I can think of is Dr. Cyclops by Manly Wade wellman, but published under a house name.
Then I know of a few from the 1950s, but then the phenomenon seems to have exploded in the 1960s with LOTS of them, and it’s been that way ever since.
I notice that the early ones I can come up with and fantasy and science fiction. What about the other genres? Were there Western or Mystery novelizations before 1950 based on original screenplays? (And I mean published separately as books, not in magazines)
According to Wikipedia, novelizations go back to at least 1928:
In Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, he says that his mother’s father (whose last name was Jenkins) invented the idea of novelizations. Perhaps his grandfather worked for Grosset & Dunlap, since they did many such early examples of this. I don’t have a copy of Merton’s book, so I can’t look this up.
There were TV novelizations, too. *The Addams Family * comes to mind, and as I recall that was a pretty good one. The Man from UNCLE, The Avengers, Lost in Space, and *The Time Tunnel * all had novels based on the series. *The Man from UNCLE * even had a magazine that featured a short novel every issue. Of course, in the case of TV novelizations, the books were original stories based on the series characters rather than adaptations of scripts. I’ve seen some Hercules and Xena novelizations, so I guess the tradition’s still not dead. And of course, there were all those *Star Trek * books where James Blish simply fleshed out episode scripts and bundled them together five or six to a book.
I seem to recall there was a paperback novel about the Monkees, or is my memory tricking me?
Getting back to the OP, in the matter of other genres *The Omen * films were all novelized, *Night of the Living Dead * was novelized, and an obscure comedy starring David McCallum called *Three Bites of the Apple * was novelized. In the Western genre, *Rio Bravo * and *The Train Robbers * were novelized; I seem to recall others, but the titles escape me. The practice has been quite common and appears to cross all genre boundaries.
Interesting information, but not what I was asking for – I was remarking that the early (pre-1950s) novelizations I knew of were SF/Fantasy, and wondering if any other early ones were in other genres. The page that’s W W’s link seems to answer that in the affirmative, unless 1928’s The Fleet’s In! was science fiction.
I know of plenty of other-genre novelizations from after 1960. I can’t think of any from before that date.
There’s an article by David Pringle in issue 80 of the magazine Interzone called “SF, Fantasy & Horror MOvie Novelizations” which is a pretty thorough survey of the subject. (What do you mean you don’t own a complete set of Interzone? Geez, Cal, you’re not much of a researcher.) Pringle thinks that the first novelization may be What Happened to Mary by Robert Carlton Brown in 1913. The movie was actually a serial which came out in 1912. Before being published as a book, the novelization was printed as a serial in the magazine Ladies’ World (which, I’m ashamed to say, I don’t own a complete set of).
I just happen to be missing that issue (which a quick internet search reveals to be from February of 1994). How did you find out about this article? Google-fu?
Ah, yes. I bought that little gem: The Monkees Go Mod. It was a novel only in the loosest sense of the word. As I recall, my 19-year-old self wanted it mainly for the photos of the charming and sexy Peter Tork.
It’s marginally later than What Happened to Mary, but I’ve seen the status of the first novelisation claimed for another serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn, which began running in cinemas in December 1913. Harold MacGrath’s novel was based on his scripts for it and published in January 1914.
> In Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, he says that
> his mother’s father (whose last name was Jenkins) invented the idea of
> novelizations. Perhaps his grandfather worked for Grosset & Dunlap, since they
> did many such early examples of this. I don’t have a copy of Merton’s book, so I
> can’t look this up.
I just picked up a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain. This incident is told in chapter 1, section v. Merton says that his grandfather was an editor at Grosset & Dunlap. He says that in about 1923 his grandfather persuaded the company to start a line of novelizations. These weren’t the first novelizations (indeed, we’ve already established that they existed ten years before), but it was early in the history of novelizations.