Worlds Beginning

by Robert Ardrey

From the original 1944 The time of Worlds Beginning is twenty years following the end of World War II. The problems of peace are no longer vague and theoretical here, as real as if it were taking place before our eyes, is what might happen within another score of years. Gigantic technical advances in a shrinking world bring the American economy to a virtual standstill. Yet in the crisis lies the seed of its magnificent solution.Worlds Beginning is a story about the future, but it is in no sense a prophecy. It concerns a dream of a better world, but it isn't a blueprint for that better world. Its theme is that American democracy, resourceful, individual and strong, need only face its problems in order to solve them.

Hardcover

First published October 12, 2014

About the author

Robert Ardrey was born in the South Side of Chicago in 1908. He attended the University of Chicago to study biology, but became the writing protegé of Thornton Wilder. He graduated in the midst of the Great Depression and supported himself with odd jobs while he wrote under Wilder's watchful eye. His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935.

He continued to have plays produced on Broadway. His most famous, Thunder Rock, became a sensation in wartime London, and is now regarded as an international classic. Ardrey's plays caught the attention of MGM executive Samuel Goldwyn; in 1938 Ardrey moved to Hollywood, where he would become MGM's highest paid writer. He is credited with over a dozen films, including The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum), and Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

In the 1950s, increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, Ardrey travelled to Africa to write a series of articles. This trip renewed his interest in human origins, and he returned to his academic training in the sciences. In 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva, and spent the next five years travelling and researching in Eastern and Southern Africa, conducting research for what would become his first scientific work, African Genesis (1961).

African Genesis and Ardrey's subsequent books were massively popular and deeply controversial. They overturned core assumptions of the social sciences and led to a revolution in thinking about human nature. Fundamentally Ardrey argued that human behavior was not entirely socially determined, rather evolutionarily inherited instincts help determine behavior and format large-scale social phenomena. Subsequent science has largely vindicated his hypotheses.

Robert Ardrey is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and received an Academy Award Nomination for best screenplay for his film Khartoum. Time magazine named African Genesis the most notable book of the 1960s.

For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

Reviews

[Frank Ashe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't remember anything about this book till I reread a few pages.

And it struck me how the situation described is relevant to the US today - media moguls and big business suborning democracy, an economy in stagnation.

It's also an interesting contrast to Atlas Shrugged.



Picked up at a 2nd hand book stall somewhere. Ex-library from a private school. Presented to the school in 1960 by G.S. Fish.

My date read is an educated guess.

[Jon]

ILL of a different edition fulfilled by the University of Kansas, Watson Library

Published in New York by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Copyright page includes this notice: "War Edition. This book is produced in accordance with conservation orders of teh War Production Board."