Lucille Fletcher

Violet Lucille Fletcher was born on March 28, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York, to Matthew Emerson Fletcher, a marine draftsman for the Standard Ship Company, and Violet Anderson Fletcher. She attended Public School 164, the Maxwell Training School, and Bay Ridge High School, where she served as president of the Arista honor society and editor of the school magazine. At seventeen, she won the regional championship of the National Oratorical Contest on the Constitution of the United States, sponsored by The New York Times at The Town Hall on May 17, 1929, becoming the only female finalist in the New York zone. Her prize included an all-expenses-paid trip to South America, a gold medal, and one thousand dollars in cash. She went on to place third in the national competition on May 25, 1929, before five justices of the United States Supreme Court, delivering an address titled "The Constitution: A Guarantee of the Personal Liberty of the Individual." Fletcher earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Vassar College in 1933.

Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1916 in the revue The Show of Wonders. She subsequently built a distinguished career as a writer for radio, film, and television. From 1934 to 1939, she worked at CBS as a music librarian, copyright clerk, and publicity writer, where she met composer Bernard Herrmann, who conducted the CBS orchestra. After a five-year courtship delayed by her parents' objections, the two married on October 2, 1939.

Fletcher's first notable writing success came when her magazine story "My Client Curley" was adapted for radio by Norman Corwin and broadcast on the Columbia Workshop on March 7, 1940; it was later adapted into the 1944 Cary Grant film Once Upon a Time. Her radio play The Hitch-Hiker premiered on The Orson Welles Show on November 17, 1941, with a score composed by Herrmann. The play was later adapted for a notable episode of The Twilight Zone television series.

Her most celebrated work, Sorry, Wrong Number, premiered on May 25, 1943, as an episode of the radio series Suspense, with Agnes Moorehead originating the role. The drama was broadcast nationwide seven times between 1943 and 1948. Fletcher's daughter Dorothy Herrmann told The New York Times that the idea originated when Fletcher encountered a rude woman at a Manhattan grocery while buying food for her sick child; Herrmann described the work as an "act of revenge." Orson Welles called it "the greatest single radio script ever written." Fletcher adapted the radio play into the screenplay for the 1948 film noir of the same name, starring Barbara Stanwyck. A 1959 radio production for the CBS series Suspense received the 1960 Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama, and the Mystery Writers of America also presented the work with an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Two operas were subsequently based on the play.

Fletcher also wrote the libretto for Herrmann's opera Wuthering Heights, adapted from the Emily Brontë novel and conceived in 1943. Herrmann completed the opera in June 1951, after the couple had divorced in 1948 following his affair with her cousin, Kathy Lucille Anderson, whom he married the following year. Fletcher and Herrmann had two daughters, Wendy and Dorothy. The opera was never produced on stage during Herrmann's lifetime, though Fletcher described it as "perhaps the closest to his talent and heart." Fletcher appeared in the 1992 documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, which received an Academy Award nomination.

On January 6, 1949, Fletcher married writer Douglass Wallop, and the two remained together until his death in 1985. In addition to her radio work, she authored ten novels, including Sorry, Wrong Number, Night Man, Blindfold, and Mirror Image, as well as stage plays and published librettos. Lucille Fletcher died of a stroke on August 31, 2000.