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Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was a prolific American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic ''Twilight Zone'' episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, among them ''7 Faces of Dr. Lao'', ''The Intruder'' and ''The Masque of the Red Death''. Novelist Dean R. Koontz has said, "Charles Beaumont was one of ''the'' seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Beaumont is also the subject of a documentary, ''(Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man ),'' by Jason V Brock. ==Life and work== Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, to Charles H. and Letty Nutt. His mother is known to have dressed him in girls' clothes, and once threatened to kill his dog to punish him. These early experiences inspired the celebrated short story "Miss Gentilbelle", but according to Beaumont, "Football, baseball and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world." School did not hold his attention, and his last name exposed him to ridicule, so he found solace as a teenager in science fiction. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to join the army. He also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, disc jockey, usher and dishwasher before selling his first story to ''Amazing Stories'' in 1950. During his time as an illustrator he briefly used the pseudonyms Charles McNutt (circa 1947/48) and E.T. Beaumont (inspired by the city of Beaumont, located in East Texas), before settling on the name Charles Beaumont. He soon adopted this name legally, and used it both personally and professionally for the rest of his life. In 1954, ''Playboy'' magazine selected his story "Black Country" to be the first work of short fiction to appear in its pages. It was also at about this time that Beaumont started writing for television and film. Beaumont was energetic and spontaneous, and was known to take trips (sometimes out of the country) at a moment's notice. An avid racing fan, he often enjoyed participating in or watching area speedway races, with other authors tagging along. His cautionary fables include "The Beautiful People" (1952), about a rebellious adolescent girl in a future conformist society in which people are obligated to alter their physical appearance (adapted as an episode of ''Twilight Zone'', "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"), and "Free Dirt" (1955), about a man who gorges on his entire vegetable harvest and dies from having consumed the magical soil he used to grow it. His short story "The Crooked Man" (also published by ''Playboy'', in 1955) presented a dystopian future wherein heterosexuality is stigmatized in the same way that homosexuality then was. It depicts heterosexuals living as furtively as pre-Stonewall gays and lesbians. In the story, a heterosexual man meets his lover in a gay orgy bar; they try to have sex in a curtained booth (she dressed in male drag) and are caught. Beaumont wrote several scripts for ''The Twilight Zone'', including an adaptation of his own short story, "The Howling Man", about a prisoner who might be the Devil, and the hour-long "Valley of the Shadow", about a cloistered Utopia that refuses to share its startlingly advanced technology with the outside world. Beaumont scripted the film ''Queen of Outer Space'' from an outline by Ben Hecht, deliberately writing the screenplay as a parody. According to Beaumont, the directorial style is not informed by his satiric intent. He penned one episode of the ''Steve Canyon'' TV show, "Operation B-52", in which Canyon and his crew attempt to set a new speed record in a B-52 accompanied by a newsman who hates Air Force pilots. Beaumont was much admired by the well-known colleagues who outlived him (Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Roger Corman), and his work is currently in the process of being rediscovered. Many of his stories have been re-released in the posthumous volumes ''Best of Beaumont'' (Bantam, 1982) and ''The Howling Man'' (Tom Doherty, 1992), and a set of previously unpublished tales, ''A Touch of the Creature'' (Subterranean Press, 1999) is now available. In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of two volumes collecting Beaumont's ''Twilight Zone'' scripts. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Charles Beaumont」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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