Customer Reviews

Shadow on the Hearth

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A typical day in a Westchester suburb of New York for a family of four is shattered by a nuclear attack on New York City. Gladys is in the basement doing her laundry, her two daughters, Barbara and Ginny are at school, and her husband Jon has taken the train to Manhattan to his job when the bombs start to fall.

The following week's events are viewed from Gladys' viewpoint as she takes in the children's teacher, a discredited nuclear scientist critical of atomic bombs, and hides him and her Slavic maid Veda from the Civil Defense patrols who might see them as enemy spies or saboteurs.

Written in 1950 this is an early science fiction look at the after effects of a nuclear war. It was adapted the same year with a less provocative script as the television drama Atomic Attack, which was the television debut for Walter Matthau as the young doctor.

Judith Merril does a very good job or of presenting Gladys as the US stay-at-home mom of the post-WWII years facing a world turned upside down. I enjoyed reading the book and recommend it.

Also can be found on a different Amazon page at:
Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril
Unknown Binding ASIN: B00005WTJZ

"A tense, prophetic novel of one woman's world -- after the bomb falls."

"Shadow on the Hearth is the story of Gladys Mitchell, a young, attractive Westchester housewife who, through hope and courage, successfully fought the chaos in the wake of an atomic war."

"...then the frantic terror, mounting slowly as the great mushroom cloud had mounted a few hours ago over New York Harbor."

Author's first novel

"Judith Merrill (b. 1923), a pen name for Josephine Juliet Grossman, was active in the Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, and still ideologically influenced by it in the 1940s."
- Alan Wald in Encyclopedia of the left. Second edition. p. 726.

"The novel is unusual for the period in that it also emphasizes the necessity of opposing mindless Red-baiting."
- Paul Brians, Nuclear holocausts: atomic war in fiction, 1895-1984. p. 259.

Judith Merril was born Josephine Judith Grossman in Manhattan in 1923. She married for the first time in 1940 and adopted Merril as her legal last name in 1941. In 1948, she published her first science fiction short story, "That Only a Mother," in Astounding, a story which gained her a great deal of renown. Just two years later she published her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, one of the few novels she was to write. In 1956 she started two things that went on to have great impact on science fiction: she helped organize the first Milford SF Writers Conference, and she edited the first of twelve annual Best SF anthologies for Dell. In 1968 she edited an influential anthology of British New Wave SF, England Swings SF, and later that year she moved to Canada as protest to the Vietnam War. She made a gift of her personal collection to the Toronto Public Library in 1970, founding the Spaced Out Library (which was later renamed the Merril Collection). In 1985 she edited the first volume of Tesseracts, which has become a successful series of Canadian short science fiction. She died in 1997 at age 74.

Also can be found on Amazon at:
Shadow on the hearth by Judith Merril
Publisher: Doubleday; 1st ed edition (1950) ASIN: B0007DW9TA

"A tense, prophetic novel of one woman's world -- after the bomb falls."

"Shadow on the Hearth is the story of Gladys Mitchell, a young, attractive Westchester housewife who, through hope and courage, successfully fought the chaos in the wake of an atomic war."

"...then the frantic terror, mounting slowly as the great mushroom cloud had mounted a few hours ago over New York Harbor."

Author's first novel

"Judith Merrill (b. 1923), a pen name for Josephine Juliet Grossman, was active in the Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, and still ideologically influenced by it in the 1940s."
- Alan Wald in Encyclopedia of the left. Second edition. p. 726.

"The novel is unusual for the period in that it also emphasizes the necessity of opposing mindless Red-baiting."
- Paul Brians, Nuclear holocausts: atomic war in fiction, 1895-1984. p. 259.

Judith Merril was born Josephine Judith Grossman in Manhattan in 1923. She married for the first time in 1940 and adopted Merril as her legal last name in 1941. In 1948, she published her first science fiction short story, "That Only a Mother," in Astounding, a story which gained her a great deal of renown. Just two years later she published her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, one of the few novels she was to write. In 1956 she started two things that went on to have great impact on science fiction: she helped organize the first Milford SF Writers Conference, and she edited the first of twelve annual Best SF anthologies for Dell. In 1968 she edited an influential anthology of British New Wave SF, England Swings SF, and later that year she moved to Canada as protest to the Vietnam War. She made a gift of her personal collection to the Toronto Public Library in 1970, founding the Spaced Out Library (which was later renamed the Merril Collection). In 1985 she edited the first volume of Tesseracts, which has become a successful series of Canadian short science fiction. She died in 1997 at age 74.

I have not read this novel. However, I have seen the early television movie Atomic Attack!, which was based on this novel and is currently available on YouTube. Apparently, the movie was produced in 1950, the same year as this novel. This would seem to make the movie, and possibly this novel, one of the earliest mass-audience works to use the terms "hydrogen bomb" and "H-bomb." This kind of bomb was not successfully tested until 1 November 1952, so that in 1950 it was just a concept.