Author Robert Bloch (1917-1994) wrote, over the course of more than five decades, novels, stories, essays, and scripts for film and television.

Best known for his novel Psycho, which was adapted into a feature film by director Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, Bloch wrote stories in the genres of horror, crime, science fiction, and fantasy. 

The American Heritage Center recently completed the processing of his papers (233 cubic feet!), and in this first blog post, we focus on his early life and his novel Psycho. 

Born in Chicago, Bloch moved with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1929. Bloch had, as he described it in a 1949 autobiographical article, “a disgustingly normal” childhood.

As a child, he was particularly taken with the silent cinema, especially Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). In his 1993 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, Bloch said, “When I ran all the way home through the dark after the film ended, the image that floated behind me was the phantom’s face. He kept me company in bed and haunted my dreams.” 

By 1958, Bloch had published several novels, including The Scarf, The Kidnaper, and The Will to Kill, as well as numerous short stories in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Fantastic Adventures, and Weird Tales. Bloch described himself at that time as “forty-one…[o]ver the hill now, for sure; ready to descend into middle age.” Yet, it was that same year that he began writing Psycho. Inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein*, whose crimes were discovered in 1957, Bloch later wrote:

I based my story on the situation, rather than on any person, living or dead, involved in the Gein Affair; indeed, I knew very little of the details concerning that case and virtually nothing about Gein himself at the time. It was only some years later, when writing my essay on Gein…that I discovered how closely the imaginary character I’d created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation.   

Soon after the novel was published in 1959, Bloch received an anonymous offer for the purchase of the movie rights to his novel. The price was $9,500, and, as Bloch described it:

My agent got ten percent, my publishers took fifteen, the tax people skimmed off their share of the loot, and I ended up with about $6,250. Hitchcock got Psycho, and the rest is history. Ancient history, really, yet people have never forgotten his brilliant film. And today, more than thirty years later [1993], the novel is still in print.**

The Robert Bloch papers includes numerous items related to Psycho, both the novel and the movie. Bloch’s novel has been translated into many foreign languages and published throughout the world. The collection includes translations into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, and Japanese, as well as American and British English-language editions. 

Also included are English- and foreign-language editions of Bloch’s two sequels, Psycho II and Psycho House, as well as a promotional towel that Warner Books created for the publication of Psycho II. 

The collection also includes a copy of the contract between Bloch and Shamley Productions, Hitchcock’s production company, for the movie rights to the novel.

There are also stills, posters, and lobby cards from the movie.

In later blog posts, we will cover Robert Bloch’s work in film and television, as well as the magazines, pulp and otherwise, that he contributed to and collected.

Happy Halloween!

*Gein was also the partial inspiration for the character Leatherface in the 1974 movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the character Buffalo Bill in the 1988 novel and the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs.

**It is worth noting that more than thirty years after Bloch wrote the above passage, Psycho is still in print and available as an e-book.  

Post contributed by AHC Processing Archivist and resident film expert Roger Simon.