author

Wells Hastings

1879–1923

A Yale-educated writer with one foot in magazine humor and the other in mystery fiction, he moved easily from novels and short stories into the fast-growing world of silent film. His career was brief, but it left behind both witty print work and screen credits from the early 1920s.

1 Audiobook

The Professor's Mystery

The Professor's Mystery

by Wells Hastings, Brian Hooker

About the author

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878, Wells Hastings studied at Yale and was involved with student humor writing there. He went on to publish fiction, including The Man in the Brown Derby and, with Brian Hooker, The Professor's Mystery, showing a knack for light, engaging storytelling with a mystery edge.

Hastings also worked in the early film industry as a writer. Sources on his film career credit him on silent-era projects including Turning the Tables (1919), Little Miss Rebellion (1920), Romance (1920), and The Ghost in the Garret (1921), reflecting a shift from print to screen that was common for adaptable writers of the period.

He died in Los Angeles in 1923, still a comparatively young man. Because his life was short, his body of work feels like a glimpse of a lively literary career cut off early, spanning college humor, popular fiction, and silent cinema.