John Warren Wadleigh (1927–2013), best known by his pen name Oliver Lange, was an American author, artist, and art critic based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He joined the Army as World War II was coming to a close and later attended Columbia University, where he met former Santa Fean author and teacher John Richard Humphreys, who became his friend and mentor.
[7] Lange's most famous and reverberating novel was Vandenberg, a Cold War near future tale starring fugitives in the New Mexico wilderness after the successful invasion of the USA by the Soviets.
[1] The eponymous hero, an individualist who deserted civilization long before the Russian attack, choosing instead to live alone with his mentally disabled son in a squalid ranch, has several traits in common with the author: he is a World War II veteran, a painter, and an expert survivalist.
Sprinkled across the third-person narrative abound inserts headed as "Communications", printed in italics, that transcribe Soviet files, quotations from actual writers on war (especially Robert Ardrey), and Vandenberg's own journals, in which he reflects on the easy defeat of the United States and the sheepish acceptance of the new regime by its people, condemning the American values of the novel's time as materialistic and shallow, which in turn have produced a "tractable, malleable...spineless people".