Parker Tyler

Harrison Parker Tyler (March 6, 1904 – July 24, 1974), was an American author, poet, and film critic.

Career Tyler co-authored The Young and Evil, in 1933 with writer Charles Henri Ford. The work was one of the first openly gay American novels and written in an experimental style, influenced by Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. The book follows young artists occupying the queer fringe of Greenwich Village, and it presents their gender, sexuality, and sexual activity frankly. Stein praised the novel in a blurb she wrote for it: "The Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation."

Tyler was mentioned several times in the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal, bringing renewed attention to Tyler's film criticism. This led Vidal to claim that "I've done for [Tyler] what Edward Albee did for Virginia Woolf" after The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies were republished in 1970.

Tyler died in New York City, where he lived, on July 24, 1974, at the age of 70.

Works Tyler's novels and books of film criticism include: The Young and Evil, with Charles Henri Ford (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1933) The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age, 1944) Magic and Myth of the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947) Chaplin: Last of the Clowns (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1948) The Three Faces of the Film: the Art, the Dream, the Cult (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960) Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Treasury (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1962) Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1969) The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography (Fleet Publishing, 1967) Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969) Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972) The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973) A Pictorial History of Sex in Films (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974)