Book News: Peter Viertel Dead at 86

by Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 11/07/2007

Screenwriter and novelist Peter Viertel succumbed to lymphoma November 6. He was 86. His death closely follows that of his wife of 47 years, actress Deborah Kerr, who passed away October 16. Viertel wrote the screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, John Huston’s The African Queen, and for Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of his novel White Hunter, Black Heart. He produced several other novels including Love Lies Bleeding and American Skin. Viertel was close friends with both John Huston, who appears as a thinly disguised John Wilson in White Hunter, Black Heart, and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom he profiled in 1992’s Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties [for a personal story about Viertel, see In the Bookroom blog].