Eric Oswald Mowbray Knight was an English author who is mainly notable for creating the fictional collie Lassie. He took American citizenship in 1942 shortly before his death.
Born on April 10, 1897, in Menston in Yorkshire, England, Eric Mowbray Knight was the third of four sons born to Frederic Harrison and Marion Hilda (née Creasser) Knight, both Quakers. His father was a rich diamond merchant who, when Eric was two years old, was killed during the Boer War. His mother then moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, to work as a governess for the imperial family. She later settled in America.
Knight had a varied career, including service in the Canadian Army during World War I and spells as an art student, newspaper reporter and Hollywood screenwriter.
He married twice, first on 28 July 1917 to Dorothy Caroline Noyes Hall with whom he had three daughters and later divorced, and secondly to Jere Brylawski on 2 December 1932.
His first novel was Song on Your Bugles (1936) about the working class in Northern England. As "Richard Hallas", he wrote the hardboiled genre novel You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up (1938). Knight's This Above All is considered one of the significant novels of the Second World War. One of Knight's last books was Sam Small Flies Again, republished as The Flying Yorkshireman.
Knight and his second wife Jere Knight raised collies on their farm in Pleasant Valley, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They resided at Springhouse Farm from 1939 to 1943. His novel Lassie Come-Home appeared in 1940, expanded from a short story published in 1938 in The Saturday Evening Post. The novel was filmed by MGM in 1943 as Lassie Come Home with Roddy McDowall in the role of Joe Carraclough and canine actor Pal in the role of Lassie. The success of the novel and film generated more films and eventually several television series, cementing Lassie's icon status. The novel remains a favourite in many reprints.
On January 15, 1943, at which time he was a major in the United States Army – Special Services, Knight was killed in an air crash in Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) in South America.
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