PHILIP WYLIE – The Savage Gentleman. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1932. Dell #85, paperback, 1945. Avon #390, paperback, 1952. University of Nebraska Press, softcover, 2011.

   Betrayed by his wife, newspaper magnate Stephen Stone takes his small son Henry and with his trusted companion Jack, a giant black man, and with the Scotsman McCobb travels to a savage paradise where he runs his yacht the Falcon aground. “Suddenly I remembered this island … I knew then that my son was going to be brought up without the influence of women. Without the knowledge of women they imbue in men.”

   So the small group of men carve a world on the island and young Henry grows into manhood, a copper haired bronzed giant, perfect in mind and body, but a savage as far as the outer world goes. Eventually Stephen repents of his anger and madness and tries to make it up to Jack (respectfully written for the era, but unfortunately a sacrificial figure, a trope still too common), McCobb, and especially Henry, but dies before he can guide Henry’s entry into civilization. While he will be fabulously rich in the real world, is Henry ready for the modern world and is the modern world ready for Henry Stone, the savage gentleman?

   Henry is none the less a superman in body and mind save for his one weakness, he is completely guileless when it comes to women, which is why when Henry meets Marian Whitney the daughter of his father’s attorney and oldest friend Elihu Whitney Henry is knocked for a loop.

   Henry isn’t just love struck, he practically has a stroke. It doesn’t help that the first thing Marian does is to enter the room laughing at the newspaper story about the recently rescued Henry Stone, a savage who probably will have to be locked up in the zoo.

   If that all sounds vaguely familiar it must be pointed out that even Lester Dent admitted he had read Wylie’s Savage Gentleman. Henry may not trill when he’s thinking or be a polymath in all subjects, and he doesn’t have an Arctic fortress or five of the most brilliant men in the country as an entourage, but he is that favorite figure of the Twenties, the superman, and somewhere between Tarzan and John Galt, he hits New York by storm.

   Of course Philip Wylie was an old hand at this. Science fiction pioneer, pulpster, sophisticated writer of stories for the slicks, literary maven, humorist, early environmentalist, philosopher, and gadfly, his career encompassed classics in all those genres.

   Even the most shallow of overviews of his career include Gladiator which inspired Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to create Superman, When Worlds Collide, which inspired Alex Raymond to create Flash Gordon (and its own strip Speed Spaudling), The Murderer Invisible (as much the inspiration of the Invisible Man films as H. G. Wells novel).  the Crunch and Des stories that helped influence John D. MacDonald to create Travis McGee, and works such as Finlay Wren, As They Reveled, Generation of Vipers, They Both Were Naked, Triumph,Tomorrow, and The Disappearance. He was a respected science fiction author, mystery writer, and literary figure all the while letting his mind and imagination range free where ever it lead him (often as not into controversy).

   Meanwhile Henry has returned to find his father’s newspaper has, under the guidance of corrupt newsman Voorhies, been commandeered by the forces of crime and corruption and of course Henry isn’t going to bother with the courts to take that on ending with a wild melee as Henry reclaims his legacy with fists flying amid a hail of gunfire.

   As a wounded Henry lies in his hospital bed at the end, Marian comes to tell him she loves him, and in scene that will be copied in a million variations in countless Hollywood newspaper movies to come…

   Just how this one avoided Hollywood I don’t know. You can practically see it as you read it as a Frank Capra film with Gary Cooper or Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur or Carole Lombard. The Savage Gentleman is a relatively short book, very much a pulp adventure tale, and more of interest as a yarn than philosophy, but that is all to the good, and there is no such think as superficial Wylie, his active mind at work in even the simplest of tales his eye every bit as savage as his hero.