Earl Henry Hamner, Jr. was born on July 10, 1923, in Schuyler, Virginia, and is a renowned American television writer and producer, often credited as Earl Hamner. He is most famous for his work on the long-running CBS series The Waltons and Falcon Crest during the 1970s and 1980s.
As a novelist, Hamner is best known for his novel Spencer's Mountain, which was inspired by his own childhood and served as the basis for both the film of the same name and the television series The Waltons, for which he provided voiceover narration.
The cantankerous Walton family grandparents in the popular television series were based on Hamner's own maternal Italian-American grandparents, Ora Lee and Colonel Anderson Gianniny, whose Italian surname was anglicized to Gianniny.
In 1954, Hamner wrote "Hit and Run," an episode of the NBC legal drama Justice, in which guest star E.G. Marshall played a man haunted by his crime of striking a newsboy on a bicycle and fleeing the scene of the accident.
Hamner also contributed eight episodes to the CBS science fiction series The Twilight Zone in the early 1960s. His first script acceptance for the series marked a significant breakthrough in his writing career in Hollywood.
Hamner created two less successful series, Boone on NBC, starring Tom Byrd and Barry Corbin, and Apple's Way on CBS, starring Ronny Cox, both of which aired in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hamner often used family names to title his projects, such as Spencer's Mountain, which was named after his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Susan Henry Spencer Hamner. The title "The Waltons" was derived from his paternal grandfather, Walter Clifton Hamner, and great-grandfather, Walter Leland Hamner.
