Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, he was the son of Presbyterian minister Edmund Melville Wylie and the former Edna Edwards, a novelist, who died when Philip was five years old. His family moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he later attended Princeton University from 1920–1923. He married Sally Ondek, and had one child, Karen, an author who became the inventor of animal "clicker" training; she was the wife of Taylor Alderdyce Pryor, a Marine helicopter pilot who became a Hawaii state senator and a co-founder of Sea Life Park and Oceanic Institute in Hawaii, of which his wife served as director. After a divorcing his first wife, Philip Wylie married Frederica Ballard who was born and raised in Rushford, New York; they are both buried in Rushford.
A writer of fiction and nonfiction, his output included hundreds of short stories, articles, serials, syndicated newspaper columns, novels, and works of social criticism. He also wrote screenplays while in Hollywood, was an editor for Farrar & Rinehart, served on the Dade County, Florida Defense Council, was a director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory, and at one time was an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy which led to the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission. Most of his major writings contain critical, though often philosophical, views on man and society as a result of his studies and interest in psychology, biology, ethnology, and physics. Over nine movies were made from novels or stories by Wylie. He sold the rights for two others that were never produced.
His wide range of interests defies easy classification but his earliest books exercised great influence in twentieth-century science fiction pulp magazines and comic books:
- Gladiator (1930) partially inspired the comic-book character Superman.
- The Savage Gentleman (1932) may have had some inspiration on the pulp-fiction character Doc Savage.
- When Worlds Collide (1933), co-written with Edwin Balmer, inspired Alex Raymond's comic strip Flash Gordon, as well as being adapted as a 1951 film by producer George Pal.
Writing as he did when less potent technology was available, he applied engineering principles and the scientific method quite broadly in his work. His novel
The Disappearance (1951) is about what happens when everyone wakes up one day and finds that all members of the opposite sex are missing (all the men have to get along without women, and vice versa). The book delves into the double standards between men and women that existed prior the woman's movement of the 1970s, exploring the nature of the relationship between men and women and the issues of women's rights and homosexuality. Many people at the time considered it as relevant to science fiction as his
Experiment in Crime.
The story
The Paradise Crater (1945) was cause for his house arrest by the federal government; it describes a post-WWII 1965 Nazi attempt to rule the world with atomic power.
His nonfiction book of essays,
Generation of Vipers (1942), was a best-seller during the 1940s and inspired the term "Momism". Some people have accused
Generation of Vipers of being misogynistic.
The Disappearance shows his thinking on the subject is very complex. (His only child, Karen Wylie Pryor, is the author of a classic book for breastfeeding mothers,
Nursing Your Baby, and has commented that her father was far from being a misogynist.) His novel of manners
Finnley Wren was also highly regarded in its time.
He wrote 69 "Crunch and Des" stories, most of which appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post, about the adventures of Captain Crunch Adams, master of the charter boat
Poseidon, which was the basis of a brief television series. His "Crunch and Des" stories were an apparent influence on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books. In 1941 Wylie became Vice-President of the International Game Fish Association and for many years was responsible for writing IGFA rules and reviewing world record claims.
He was also active in writing detective and mystery novelettes for a variety of magazines. Five of them were collected in 2010 as
Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Mysteries, published by Crippen & Landru in its "Lost Classics" series and edited by Bill Pronzini.
An article Wylie written in 1951 in
The Saturday Evening Post entitled 'Anyone Can Raise Orchids' led to the popularization of this hobby — not just the rich, but gardeners of every economic level began experimenting with orchids
In August 1963, his niece Janice Wylie was murdered, along with her roommate Emily Hoffert, in New York City. The crime, which became known as the "Career Girls Murder Case," led to the — at that time — most expensive criminal investigation in New York's history. The case provided the inspiration for the television movie
The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which led to the television series
Kojak.
Philip Wylie died from a heart attack on October 25, 1971. Some of his papers, writings, and other possessions are in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library.
