Walter Wager
American novelist (1924-2004)
Walter Herman Wager (September 4, 1924 – July 11, 2004) was an American crime and espionage-thriller novelist and former editor-in-chief of Playbill magazine. The movie Telefon, starring Charles Bronson, was inspired by his novel of the same name. His book 58 Minutes was adapted into Die Hard 2, starring Bruce Willis.
Education and career
Walter Wager was born in The Bronx, New York City, the son of a doctor and a nurse who had emigrated from the Russian Empire. A 1944 graduate of Columbia College, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, he went on to a Harvard Law School degree three years later. Passing the bar exams but choosing not to practice, he went on to receive a master's degree in aviation law from Chicago's Northwestern University in 1949, while also serving as an editor of the Journal of Air Law and Commerce, then based in that city.
Afterward, he spent a year at the Sorbonne, in Paris, as a Fulbright Fellow. He spent a year in Israel as an aviation-law consultant for the Israeli Department of Civil Aviation, helping to negotiate a treaty on air space and working out of Lydda Airport in Tel Aviv. In 1952, he returned to New York City, where he worked for the United Nations, editing documents.
Shortly afterward, Wager segued into writing and producing radio and television documentaries for CBS and NBC, and the United States Information Agency, while also beginning a side career as a freelance writer for magazines including Playbill and Show.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4018041. VIAF identifies the subject as 121751091. The Library of Congress control number is n79045375. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 2004, 1944 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walter Wager” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.