Rod Serling

Rod Serling was an American screenwriter and television producer best known for the live dramas he wrote in the 1950s and for creating the anthology series The Twilight Zone. Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1924 and raised mostly in Binghamton, he started out writing for radio stations in Ohio before turning to television scripts, and his breakthrough came when Kraft Television Theatre aired Patterns in 1955. He followed it with Requiem for a Heavyweight for Playhouse 90 in 1956. Wanting to escape sponsor interference, he created The Twilight Zone, which premiered on CBS on October 2, 1959 and ran five seasons; of its 156 episodes, he wrote 92. Later he wrote and hosted Night Gallery and wrote the western series The Loner. Nominated for nine Primetime Emmy Awards, he won six. He died in 1975.