Robert Bloch

Though author Robert Bloch's career was frequently encapsulated by his most famous work - the 1959 novel Psycho, which served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film of the same name - he produced a vast and celebrated body of work, including numerous books, short stories, screenplays and teleplays over the course of a six-decade career that minted him as one of the masters of horror fiction. He began publishing stories in his teens, emulating the eldritch fantasies of his mentor, H.P. Lovecraft. But in the 1940s, Bloch wrote a series of novels in which the terror was generated by all-too-human sources, beginning with the fetish thriller The Scarf (1947) and culminating in Psycho, a novel of lethal split personalities based on the real-life crimes of Ed Gein, later the inspiration for "The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre" (1974). Hitchcock's "Psycho" allowed him to work steadily in television and features, writing for "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (CBS, 1955-1960; 1962-64; NBC, 1960-62; 1964-65) and "Star Trek" (NBC, 1966-69), among other series, while continuing to turn out novels and short stories at a prolific rate. He returned to Psycho for two sequels, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), which were unrelated to the Hitchcock film and continued to write until his death in 1994. Bloch's vision of psychological terror lurking within the façade of everyday life, as well as his substantive body of work, had a profound influence on the horror genre, of which he was one of its most respected practitioners.