Triumph

by Philip Wylie

In the world’s upper hemisphere, only one small group has survived World War III: fourteen people, sheltered deep within a limestone mountain in Connecticut and with enough supplies and equipment to maintain their subsistence for upwards of two years. The group includes a forward-thinking millionaire and his family, a levelheaded Jewish scientist, a playboy, an aging African American servant and his daughter, a gigolo and the glamorous woman who has been his mistress, a beautiful Chinese girl, a young meter reader, two children, and a Japanese engineer. Fully aware of the outcome of the war that had raged briefly above them, the survivors seethe with hatred, fall into depression over their losses, rise to moments of superhuman bravery, and lapse into behavior that reflects their human weaknesses. Philip Wylie mercilessly predicts the inevitable end of a world that continues to function as selfishly and as barbarously as our own.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Apocalyptic, Post Apocalyptic, Horror

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Philip Gordon Wylie 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. 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.

Reviews

[Bev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Triumph by Philip Wylie is a terrible book. No--I don't mean the writing. Or the way Wylie tells his story. Or anything to do with Wylie's craft as an author. That is all top-notch. Five-star reading material. What I mean is...this is the most horrific rendering of World War III, of nuclear holocaust, that I've read. To think that any member of the human race could possibly commit themselves to the wholesale slaughter of the entire Northern Hemisphere just so they could say that they "won." I can't imagine. Or, rather--now, thanks to Philip Wylie, I can.

And that, in a nutshell, is what Triumph is about. It is the 1960s and the height of the Cold War. The Russians have long been plotting the ultimate assault that will lead to control of whatever remains of the earth. Russia's Red army marches into Yugoslavia to "liberate" its people and an ultimatum is given to the President of United States and the leaders of England and France telling them they have two hours to confirm with Russia that they will not interfere. The President barters for time to negotiate, but it really doesn't matter if he has two hours or six. Because at the appointed time, Russia begins attacking the U.S. with everything they've got.

No one ever believed that either of the superpowers would go all-out. If nuclear war came, only certain strategic targets would be hit in order bring surrender. Russia isn't interested in surrender--they want to remove any possibility of any Americans (or any countries in the Northern Hemisphere) interfering with a plan for world domination. So, they play dirty. Literally. Using dirty bombs loaded to the gills with material that is hundreds of times more radioactive than necessary and then setting off special bombs that will send radioactive salt into the atmosphere to clean out anyone the missiles might have missed.

Russia's plan also includes secret, hidden bomb shelters specially designed to preserve a few thousand of the elite, super-Russians (sound familiar? master race anyone?) who will come forth to take over the earth once all phases of the war plan have been carried out. But Russia doesn't reckon on a few specialized submarines that the U.S. navy had managed to keep hidden up its sleeve...or bomb shelter fortress prepared by a Connecticut millionaire which saves the lives of fourteen Americans.

It's not just the idea that anyone could be so hell-bent on power that they would systematically eradicate everyone in the Northern Hemisphere (including, through what retaliation the US and its allies can muster, their own people). And, of course, the U.S. is not portrayed as the white-hatted hero. There is plenty about how our stock-piling of weapons and contributions to the Cold War made this event possible. All adding to the horror of the nuclear onslaught. What is also horrific about Wylie's story is the detailed descriptions of what happened on the surface of the northern part of the earth during the missile strikes and their aftermath. Realistic and terrible. And even knowing that we are no longer living in the Cold War Era doesn't prevent the shivers and the question...what if? What if another Hitler-like madman seizes power in a country with nuclear capability? Would that person be willing to go all-out just for the chance to say, however briefly, "I'm the winner! I rule the world!" It's a very sobering thought.

It is also very interesting to read Wylie's 1960s take on race relations and gender. Yes, it's dated. Yes, there are a few stereotypes that will bother modern sensibilities. But it very much represents the time it was written while allowing Wylie to examine those stereotypes and give them a bit of shake. He allows his characters to learn and change and grow through this horrible experience. Is it realistic to expect that all fourteen of the survivors would miraculously break through whatever hangups they brought with them to the shelter? Perhaps not. But it does provide an excellent character study. As mentioned--five stars for every thought-provoking moment and every horrific shudder at the thought of all-out nuclear war.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

While researching a thesis on C.G. Jung I obtained the catalog of all the books in his library at the time of his death from his son Franz. Thereupon I proceeded, time permitting, to read as much of what Jung had apparently read as possible. One such favored author was Philip Wylie. Triumph was published just after Jung's death, but as he was a bit of a scifi fan himself and as I'd always enjoyed Wylie, I had to read it.

Well written, it's a sobering novel.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this in a lot off ebay. It was published in 1964, when the Cold War and Vietnam were still very very real.

World War III took place on a hot Friday afternoon in July. But most Americans never even knew it. On the entire continent of North America only 14 humans survived...only 14 heard the news that...The United States of America has been obliterated and burned to death...There is no USA!!"

and now for what I thought...

Terrifying in its accuracy. I found myself worrying about those I love, because the US was gone -- This book took a little to get moving, but once you knew the characters, and the world ended, it got going.

As it is from the 60's, and women's lib and equality of any sort was still in limbo - this book does a pretty good job of not making everything gender/race specific. They do remind you often that Lido is Chinese, and George is Japanese, and and and -- but it still isn't too bigoted. I also like that the women (although they did do the housework to some extent, but only after the men had to do the mining...and fairly I think) were not regulated to the kitchen. The chores were shared equally for the most part, and one of the women was instrumental in the "engineer" group.

In any case, I highly recommend this book, even though it was mighty scary -- and I know for a time this could have actually happen (it still could, but I think the fear of nuclear annihilation has been downplayed a bit - it is still a SCARY book)

[Mark Sabol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this at about 14- a year or so after it was published - and was blown away by it. All kinds of character intrigue in a massive self-sustaining underground bomb shelter (think indoor cavern-swimming pool and state of the art (for 60's) everything... after WWIII and the world above inhabitable. Not sure how it would hold up, but I remember it 60 years later!

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iconic, one of my favorite books of all time. It's held up through several re-reads (from my first read as a teenager until now). It's one of those sci-fi novels that's really in large part about the "psychological" study of the characters as they handle both the scope of this disaster and how they have been thrust together.

[Evelyn Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an old book, but more timely now than ever. It tells the story of a group of people who, through the foresight of the host, survive a nuclear holocaust of global proportions. It is both horrifying and uplifting, and a cautionary tale that should be read by everyone.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow...a great read.

Besides a few passages that were really more like lectures, this is a book I will read again. There are some neat ideas in the book.

[Shari Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book that should be required reading for any and all politicians and political advisers, generals, and anyone who would have a say in decisions involving war.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science fiction's most common motif is speculating on our future. Sometimes, though, it also gives a glimpse of our past. That is especially true with reissues of classic works, such as Philip Wylie's Triumph .[return][return]First published in 1963, Triumph is a heart-of-the-Cold War tale of nuclear apocalypse. The trigger of a cataclysmic World War III is a confrontation with Communists in a post-Tito Yugoslavia. Fourteen people gain shelter in a massive underground facility built by a wealthy businessman in a Connecticut mountain. It is stocked with equipment and supplies to enable them to survive for two years. Given the suddenness of the nuclear exchange, this is a rather randomly through together group. They include the millionaire, his wife, their daughter and her well-bred fiancee; the family's African-American butler and his daughter; a brilliant Jewish scientist, who also happens to have had Navy combat training; a gigolo and his mistress; two children separated from their parents in the holocaust; the daughter of a wealthy Chinese businessman; and a Japanese engineer. Although the scientist. Ben Bernman, is the most frequent focus, the group as a whole helps reflect the devastating impact of nuclear war and how individually and collectively they try to survive physically and psychologically.[return][return]While Triumph still fits in the mainstream of modern post-apocalyptic literature, its reissue also allows it to serve as a window on then-current American thought. First, there is no doubt this is a conflict between good and pure evil. In Wylie's hands, the nuclear exchange seems inevitable. The free world, he writes, never understood that "Russian Communist leaders had always been willing to pay any price whatsoever to conquer the world, so long as some world remained to be ruled in slavery, and so long as some of the Soviet elite survived to be its rulers."[return][return]Thus, the Soviets not only strike with extreme nuclear force, they take long-planned steps to try to assure some survivability of its elite and possible control of regions in the southern hemisphere. The Soviets also don't hesitate to use dirty weapons to spew deadly radiation throughout the U.S. to attempt to ensure it will be unlivable and unusable for generations. Bernman frequently makes observations about the various types of radiation used and released in the weapons and their effects. That detail perhaps is not surprising given that Wylie was at one time a special advisor to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Committee for Atomic Energy. Yet Wylie also goes to the personal level, exploring, for example, how persons with differing views on even building nuclear armaments can be driven to a fury and revenge that leads to additional nuclear exchanges even when most of a nation has been incinerated or poisoned.[return][return]From a domestic standpoint, the polyglot make-up of the survivors provides Wylie plenty of opportunity to comment on a variety of social issues, not the least being race and male-female relations. The language reflects the book's time, with occasional references to "colored people" and "Negro." Still, Wylie is never overbearing in his examination of those issues. For example, race is explored not only in the context of the issues presented by the civil rights movement but also by discussing racial problems that arose between the Chinese and Japanese.[return][return]Balance of review here.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Philip Wylie was a man of ideas – a social critic, primarily. Although he was entirely capable of producing fiction of serious artistic pretensions and even merit (*Finnley Wren*, *Opus 21*), he tended to regard polished craftsmanship as a waste of time that got in the way of getting out whatever message he was interested in conveying. This attitude mars ��� defines, even – Wylie’s less successful fictions, and matters were not helped by the fact that by 1963, he had traded in his alcoholism for an amphetamine addiction and found himself in increasingly dire financial straits.

We should therefore not be surprised to find that the goings-on of his band of characters bunkered during and after a nuclear war should be periodically interrupted by miniature essays on sexual mores or the evils of racial prejudice. (The characters themselves are mostly two-dimensional.) We should also not be surprised to find that the novel’s best writing is to be found in those passages describing nuclear detonations and their effects on people. Truman Keefer, to date and probably for all eternity Wylie’s only biographer, gets it exactly right: “It would be wise to read only these parts of *Triumph* and to skip the rest of the pages, which recount impossible feats of technology, improbable acts of heroism, unlikely triumphs of reason over racial prejudice, and, as a change of pace, the boring attempts of the survivors to entertain themselves with reading and roller-skating.”

Otherwise the writing is flabby with clumsy, useless verbiage (“the blood trickled redly”), annoyingly repetitive epithets (how often do we have to be reminded that Farr has red hair?), a tone that lurches back and forth between the Latinate stentorian and the almost-demotic even within sentences, and his consistently weird (Wylie would’ve typed “consistently-weird”) use of hyphens.

Needless to say, much in the novel has dated badly, and although Wylie displays his deep knowledge of science and engineering – and does so a bit too often, wouldn’t you know – he seems blissfully unaware that in the event of full-scale nuclear war fought exclusively in the northern hemisphere, nuclear winter would eventually doom the southern hemisphere as well. But then, such awareness would’ve made the novel’s happy ending impossible.

Sadly, the aspect of the novel most likely to appeal to readers nowadays, and thus the source of whatever enduring appeal it might have, is the comic-book Cold War mentality. Our Good Guys are an ethnically and even racially diverse bunch – Wylie was indeed progressive for his time – even including a Japanese (no hard feelings, I guess!) and a Chinese (admittedly from Hong Kong, not the People’s Republic). But the Bad Guys are so many treacherous worker bee Russki Orcs out to enslave whatever is left of the world after destroying the enemy and most of themselves as well, fiendishly destructive except when their native incompetence is necessary to the plot. Oh, and faceless of course, except that they're ruled over by a guy with an absurdly-sinister (here’s looking at you, PW) Salvador Dali mustache.

Thus, with regret, two somewhat generous stars. With regard to the descriptions of nuclear holocaust, the best passages of *Triumph*, one would do just as well to read the similar ones in Wylie's earlier novel *Tomorrow!* with its marginally less improbable happy ending; those put off by his apparently cavalier attitude toward environmental destruction would be well advised to consider his shrill but undeniably effective and sobering posthumous *End of the Dream*.

[Diana Welsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to read books about nuclear war. It feels bad, and I like to feel bad. Feeling bad feels good. So whenever I find out about a new nuclear war book, I add it to my list.

Triumph was one of the "harder" nuclear war books I've read. It focused on the hard science aspect of a nuclear holocaust. But it alternated that with the interpersonal dramas of the last (well, pretty much) living Americans , surviving in an underground bunker in Connecticut.

The bunker belongs to the Bill Gates of 1964, a wealthy merchant named Vance Farr, who owns a colossal mansion on top of a mountain. When the Soviets blow the shit out of America, he is at home with the following people, who are whisked into the bunker:

-Farr's alcoholic wife, Valerie
-His hot and sexy virginal daughter, Faith
-A physicist, Ben Berman, who is a family friend
-Faith's rock-dumb jock fiancee, Kit
-Lotus Li, the hot and sexy daughter of one of Farr's Chinese business associates
-Farr's African American butler, Paulus
-Paulus's hot and sexy daughter Connie
-George Hyama, the son of the Farr's Japanese gardener
-This guy who was just there to read the electric meter

Later on, they rescue four people who made it from a nearby apartment building into a tunnel that connects to the bunker, including
-Vance Farr's hot and sexy showgirl mistress, Angelica
-Angelica's boy toy, Al
-Dot and Dick, two kids who got separated from their parents in the disaster.

The entire Northern hemisphere is gone and totally radioactive, but this veritable United Nations of people lives in comparative luxury in the bunker, which Vance has stocked with everything they might need. It has the best of equipment to keep the air clean, provide them with food and water, and entertain them for over two years. They can even communicate with the outside world. Between Vance, Ben, and George, who happens to be a scientist as well, they can solve pretty much any problem that comes up. And two years is more than enough time for someone from a country that didn't get blown off the face of the earth to come rescue them...right?

A lot of the book is devoted to the drama that people in confined spaces get themselves into, especially when there are so many attractive women and available men together. The rest of it is about them building sensors to monitor the conditions outside and trying to solve various problems they encounter.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but this book was different from some other nuclear war books I've read (Level 7 or This Is the Way the World Ends, for instance) in that it didn't end in the most depressing way possible. And while that's kind of the reason I read these books, I still enjoyed Triumph, in all its dryness. I also appreciated that it managed to not be as sexist and racist as possible, a problem old sci-fi books often have. While it does talk about race in a way that reflects the time period, the women in the book were intelligent and not hysterical, and weren't just relegated to cleaning up after the men.

[Andy Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was first published in 1963. This shows in the language used and the attitudes of some of the characters, but it also means that the possibility of a global nuclear war was very real at the time of writing.

A diverse group of people are conveniently at a very rich man's house when World War III breaks out, and they are quickly ushered into his personal fallout shelter. This shelter is a bit like Batman's utility belt in that it seems to contain every item that is important to the plot due to the immense foresight of its planner. They listen to the radio as the entire northern hemisphere is completely destroyed by a nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR. The USSR is very much shown to be the bad guys, but I'm not sure that that USA behaves much better.

The rest of the novel is basically a soap opera concerning the various relationships between the survivors, crossed with a nuclear war survival manual (for those of us who have unlimited resources and have planned for almost any eventuality in advance). For once, the women and ethnic groups are basically treated as equals and all make contributions to the group's survival.

The group are able to listen to broadcasts from the outside world (and even view TV broadcasts) and the narration tells of goings on in other countries, so we learn what happened after the war elsewhere. This aspect of the book included some plot points that I haven't read in other nuclear war stories, so that made a nice change, even if I thought some of it was a little bit unrealistic. That said, a lot of the details of the story have been well researched and give a brutal view of what would happen in this sort of conflict.

I've read a lot of books like this one, and this is one of the best. If you liked it, try Tomorrow! by the same author.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an era of the rebirth of post-apocalyptic fiction, characterized by either environmental disaster or by zombies, it is interesting to read a work that came at the beginning of such a concept in modern times. Writing in the early 1960's, Wylie asks what the world would be like in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Though unabashedly portraying the Soviets as obsessed with world domination (again, this was written in a time when the phrase "iron curtain" accurately described the lack of transparency between the two hegemonies), he doesn't let the US off the hook for partaking in the insane world dynamic of mutually assured destruction. In fact, the ending of the book is very satisfactory because it remains realistic and still provides a level of hope to the audience of the day.

A brief note on pacing. The one aspect of the book that I did not like was that it felt like a three act work that spent three-quarters of the book on act one, skipped act two completely, and rushed into act three. In other words, I spent the entire book thinking, "When is it going to get going?" and then all of a sudden, the final plot points occur and the book is over.

[Jimmy J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun, interesting book to read. Wylie's take on race at the time seems a bit bigoted, equally as much as his female characters are very "male created." Still, his knowledge of nuclear weapons and radiation's effects is realistic and well described. This is an interesting look into the Cold War era.

[Laura Nickerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally good nuclear war story. Bit dated. Hero is a physicist who befriends a wealthy man with a survival instinct. Happens to be at his house when nuclear war breaks out between USA/USSR. Cold war notions are prevalent and very old school misogony, but an enjoyable read when they get trapped in an underground shelter for an extended time with several others. Worth the 4 stars. Easy read.

[Anna G · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Dad brought this home from a job site in 1964 - I read it then and have reread it about 4 times through the years. . . it's just a real good book that's easy to read. I must say it's been about 20 years since I last picked it up so not sure how it would process with my taste today but I really liked it and the subject matter is still relevant today....sadly

[Allen Massey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the 60's and the discussions about race and women really show their age. But I still found the story of surviving in a rich mans super fall out shelter intriguing. Glad I read it.

[Shari Scott]

Wrong book