The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl

Gerald Allan "Jerry" Sohl Sr. (1913 - 2002) was an American television scriptwriter and science fiction author who wrote for The Twilight Zone (as a ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Star Trek: The Original Series (once using the pseudonym "Nathan Butler") and other shows. He wrote more than twenty novels as well as feature film scripts. He also wrote the nonfiction works Underhanded Chess and Underhanded Bridge in 1973. New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson described his 1953 novel The Transcendent Man as "contain[ing] enough twists to afford the reader a few hours' entertainment." His 1955 Point Ultimate is a piece of Cold War invasion literature: in 1999, a faraway future history at the time of writing, the US lies under a cruel Soviet occupation, reinforced by a deadly artificial disease which makes conquered Americans dependent on the conquerors for the injections that keep them alive. In The Time Dissolver (1957), a man and a woman wake one morning to find that they have lost all memory of the past eleven years, including how they met and become married. As Charles Beaumont became increasingly ill from a mysterious brain illness, possibly Pick's disease or very early onset Alzheimer's and unable to write, Sohl ghostwrote three episodes of The Twilight Zone for him. These were "The New Exhibit", "Queen of the Nile" and "Living Doll". Beaumont insisted on splitting the fees for each episode.