Arch Oboler (December 7, 1907 – March 19, 1987) was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, and director who was active in radio, films, theater, and television.

He grew up a voracious reader and discerning music appreciator, listening to the likes of violinist Fritz Kreisler and the great soprano Amelita Galli-Curci.

[citation needed] Oboler entered radio because he believed it had great unrealized potential for telling stories with ideas.

The success of Rich Kid landed Oboler a lucrative 52-week stint writing plays for Don Ameche for The Chase and Sanborn Hour.

During this time, Oboler wrote a number of idea plays and some were aired, in shortened form, on The Rudy Vallée Show and The Magic Key of RCA.

He was unenthusiastic at first, "a weekly horror play that went on at Tuesday midnight to the somber introduction of 12 doleful chimes, was not exactly my idea of a writing Shangri-La...".

[3] But Oboler soon realized that the midnight time slot and the lack of a sponsor gave him the freedom to experiment with both story content and style.

Although NBC maintained strict neutrality regarding Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Oboler smuggled anti-fascist messages onto the program.

In that story, the tiny heart of a chicken, kept alive in a Petri dish in a lab, grows exponentially until it covers the entire earth.

The story made such an impression on a young Bill Cosby that he created a memorable comic routine (featured on the Wonderfulness album) around his childhood memories of Chicken Heart; Stephen King also singles out Chicken Heart as a memorable episode in his discussion of horror radio in the book Danse Macabre.

"I found myself wanting the dimensions of that half hour on the air expanded to take in the actual horror of a world facing, with half-shut eyes, the fascistic Frankenstein's monster moving over Europe.".

In Oboler's sketch, host Don Ameche and guest Mae West portrayed a slightly bawdy Adam and Eve, satirizing the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden.

An impressive roster of actors worked for scale to appear in Oboler's plays, including Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Edmond O'Brien, Elsa Lanchester and James Cagney.

The harrowing story of Joe Bonham, a World War I casualty with no limbs, eyes, ears, or mouth, was particularly suited to radio.

Oboler created striking sound effects for the play, including the eerie vibration of bed springs, which Joe Bonham learns to recognize as the movement of people entering and exiting his hospital room.

Oboler's Plays For Americans was World War II propaganda in half-hour radio drama form, each story teaching a lesson about wartime responsibility.

Bette Davis starred in Adolf and Mrs. Runyon, a fantasy-comedy where Hitler finds himself magically transported into the back seat of a car belonging to an irate war bride.

Like Plays For Americans, To the President had a star-studded cast including actors such as Fred MacMurray, Claude Rains, and Harry Carey.

According to a retrospective article at mondo-video.com, many writers and dramatic artists, including Rod Serling, François Truffaut and Don Coscarelli have claimed Oboler's films and radio work as significant influences.

Sidney Lumet directed Oboler's Broadway play, Night of the Auk, a science fiction drama about astronauts returning to Earth after the first Moon landing.

[8] Produced by Kermit Bloomgarden, the play ran for only eight performances in December 1956 despite a cast that included Martin Brooks, Wendell Corey, Christopher Plummer, Claude Rains and Dick York.

The mood of the return voyage is far from jubilant, what with a loathed egomaniac in command, a succession of murders and suicides, the discovery that full-scale atomic war has broken out on earth, and the knowledge that the rocket ship itself is almost surely doomed.

Closing at week's end, the play mingled one or two thrills with an appalling number of frills, one or two philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it.

Authorized by the Oboler family, this new production, directed by Adam Levi with co-direction by Kaitlyn Samuel, was a 75-minute one-act version of the original play, adapted by playwright Michael Ross Albert.

His short story "And Adam Begot" was included in Julius Fast's Out of This World anthology (Penguin, 1944) "Come to the Bank" was published in Weird Tales (Fall 1984).

[12] "Happy Year," a short story based on an Oboler script "from the Good News program," was published (beginning on page 8) in the December 1940 issue of Radio and Television Mirror.

[14] The house was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright; the Wright-designed Oboler residential complex was named Eaglefeather (which was destroyed[15] in 2018 by the Woolsey Fire).