American novelist
Alexander Hill Key (September 21, 1904 – July 25, 1979) was an American science fiction writer who primarily wrote children's literature.[1]
Early life
Alexander Key was born in 1904 in LaPlatte, Maryland to Alexander Hill and Charlotte (Ryder) Key. The family soon moved to Florida, where he spent the next 6 years of his life. His father owned a sawmill and cotton gin, both of which were burned by "night riders" shortly before his father's death when Key was about six. Between the time of his father's death and his mother's death in an accident when he was 15, Key attended at least 14 different schools, including a military school in Georgia.[2]
After his mother's death, Key was raised by various relatives for the rest of his childhood.[3]
At 18, Key enrolled in the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois, which he attended between 1921 and 1923.[1][4]
Literary work
His novel Escape to Witch Mountain was made into a popular live-action film by Disney in 1975, 1995, and again in 2009. The sequel was made into another film in 1978. His novel The Incredible Tide became an anime series called Future Boy Conan in 1978.
He is known for his portrayals of alien but human-looking people who have tremendously strong psychic/psionic abilities, a close communion with nature, and who can telepathically speak with animals. In his nonfiction book The Strange White Doves, he professed his belief that animals are conscious, thinking, feeling, perceiving, independent, and self-aware intelligent beings, and that they have subtle ways of communicating, perhaps via empathy or telepathy. The protagonists of Key's books are often ostracized, feared, or persecuted because of their astonishing abilities or extraterrestrial origins, and Key uses this as a clear metaphor for racism and other prejudice.
In several of his novels (most notably The Case of the Vanishing Boy), Key portrays some sort of communal withdrawal from society by a group of like-minded individuals. Key sometimes depicted government-sponsored social services for children as inefficient or even counterproductive in its efforts: in The Forgotten Door, social services is presented as a clearly undesirable alternative for the protagonist Little Jon, and, in Escape to Witch Mountain, Tony and Tia actively flee the system. In both cases, however, it is for a very logical reason: the characters are "not from around here". All they want to do is go home and, happily, a few of us locals have the decency to help them do so (Key's The Forgotten Door predates E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial by over 10 years).
The plot of Key's The Magic Meadow is even more poignant for any reader who has ever been bedridden in a hospital. Its ending in particular is phenomenally optimistic. That was another Alexander Key theme: that good and decent people deserve to escape to a place worthy of them.
