Emile Zola Ball point pen on paper 1980’s

Cover by Earl Mayan Here Comes a Candle, Fredric Brown Bantam, 1950 "a grim look at the underside of a sanitized post-World War II America.”

Levittown, NY, 1950’s

“Was Paul Cryder propped up in bed, his finger on the trigger of a gun?… Then Hero saw that the man was dead.”

“Sitting by herself in the semi-gloom of the stable, Tina was cold with fear.”

“The voice of a child again penetrated the darkness. ‘They were angry today, Daddy’.”

Earl Mayan illustration for The Hand of Mary Constable by Paul Gallico. From Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Volume Two, 1964 Spring Selections.

Mayan’s cat, 1950’s.

Original illustration from Argosy magazine, 1960’s, Earl Mayan

Mayan with his cat, 1954.

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel, illustrated by Earl Mayan, 1965, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. About a president who may be insane. Sounds familiar.

Portrait of Monet

Still life with flowers, 1980’s.

Earl Mayan at home, Christmas 1960

Merry Christmas! Mayan, 1987

Mayan’s cover for The End of My Life by Vance Bourjaily, Bantam, 1952. The main character in the novel, a volunteer in the Ambulance Corps in Africa in WWII, gradually comes to lose all his feelings for other people, and thus his desire for life.

Cover, 1951 Bantam: Low-down (The Kansas City Milkman) by Reynolds Packard

Original illustration by Mayan, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, Bantam Books A883, 1951.

In the early 1950’s Mayan made dozens of covers for Bantam paperbacks, such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1951) and many westerns such as Shane (1950). The cover art for Shane remained the same for 30 years.

From The Frightened Wife, Mary Roberts Rinehart, SEP 2-14-1953

The Saturday Evening Post, The Frightened Wife, 1953

SEP, The Frightened Wife, 2-21-1953

The Frightened Wife, 1953

Part 1, SEP 2-14-1953. “The sign on the door says ‘Private,’ he told her coldly.”

The Curious Case of the Frightened Wife, a mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart, illustrated by Earl Mayan. The Saturday Evening Post, 1953.

SEP, 5-4-1957, No Blade of Grass

“She went on firing until the magazine was exhausted.”

SEP, “No Blade of Grass,” 1957

It seems like a good time to reread The Death of Grass, by John Christopher, first published in the U.S. as No Blade of Grass in 1956. It was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and illustrated by Earl Mayan. “Pirrie’s small body lay stretched across the camber of the road…”

Earl Mayan on a page from the Saturday Evening Post showing some of the magazine’s notable illustrators, around 1960.