Grubb wrote Shadow of My Brother in 1956 (published in 1966), his only book not about Appalachia but about the lynching of a little black boy in Mississippi. ‘‘I was very upset by the film version of Night of the Hunter, because it hadn’t conformed exactly with what I had seen in my own mind,’’ he said of the Robert Mitchum movie. His renown came with his first novel, The Night of the Hunter (1953), a gripping suspense story adapted to film in 1955 and for television in 1991.Īlthough The Night of the Hunter is his most famous work, Grubb regarded his next novel, A Dream of Kings (1954), as his best. His first published story was ‘‘The Lollipop Tree’’ ( Good Housekeeping, 1944). He returned to Philadelphia and at night wrote stories. It was published, he said, in Anthology of 100 Radio Plays, and he received $5. Grubb’s first commercial writing was the script for a 1939 radio show aired by WBLK-Clarksburg. The brush, however, was never far from reach, and Grubb remained an artist all his life. In 1939, he went to New York City as a page for NBC and to write radio plays, alternating for the next decade between New York and Philadelphia, where he worked for an advertising agency. Intending initially to be a graphic artist, Grubb studied design in Philadelphia after completing high school. Grubb was likewise critical of organized religion. Grubb’s family was evicted from their home and the trauma, no doubt dramatized by Grubb, became in his writing a cry against the powerful and against capitalistic society.

He came from prosperous forebears, his grandfather William Davis Alexander having been among the founders of Moundsville’s Mercantile Bank, but the family fortunes were reduced by the Depression. Novelist Davis Alexander Grubb (July 23, 1919-July 24, 1980) was born in Moundsville in an area where both sides of his family had lived for generations.

Davis grubb night of the hunter