• Name: Rodman Edward “Rod” Serling.

• Born: 25 December 1924, Syracuse, New York, US. .

• Father: Samuel Lawrence Serling.

• Mother: Esther Serling.

• Wife / Husband: Caroline Kramer.

        Serling was born on December 25, 1924 in Syracuse, New York, to a Jewish family. He was the second of two sons born to Esther (nee Cooper) and Samuel Lawrence Serling. Serling’s father worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before having a child, but adopted his father-in-law’s profession as a grocery to earn a steady income. Sam Dippling later became a butcher, when the Great Depression forced the store to close. Rod had an older brother, Robert J. Serling. His mother was a homemaker.

        After his family moved there in 1926, Serling spent most of his youth 70 miles south of Syracuse in the city of Binghamton. His parents encouraged his talent as an artist. Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod often played plays (with or without neighborhood children). His elder brother, the writer Robert, recalled that, at the age of six or seven, Rod entertained himself for hours by acting by communicating with pulp magazines or the films he had seen. Rod often spoke to the people around him without waiting for his answer.

        Serling’s second Emmy victory came a year later, producing the Request for Heavyweight for a heavyweight in 1956, starring Jack Palance. During the late 1950s, Serling confronted the CBS network when he insisted on editing his controversial scripts. CBS caught its way and revised its screenplay about lynchings, titled A Town Has to Dust, and another about corruption in a labor union called The Rank and File.

         Instead of continuing to fight the inevitable censorship, Serling switched from realism to the sci-fi fantasy genre in 1959, with the iconic series The Twilight Zone. Not only did Serling write the series, but he was also its face, acting as its on-screen narrator. The Twilight zone lasted until 1964 and made Serling her third Emmy.

Serling served in the US Army during World War II and began writing scripts for Cincinnati radio and television stations while a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs in Ohio (BA, 1950). In 1951 he began selling television dramas for the Live Network series and quickly became one of the medium’s lead writers: Over the next four years, he sold 90 freelance scripts.

        He won the 1955 Emmy Award for his script patterns, a tale of ruthless business executives and the 1957 Emmy Award for his script Requiem for a heavyweight. Serling’s plays were often controversial, and despite his opposition, A Town Has Turn to Dust (1958), about lynchings, and Rank and File (1959) about Labor-Union corruption, largely by CBS-TV censors But were revised.

        In the early 1970s, he found a teaching job in Ithaca, New York. While continuing to write for television, he sought to impart a sense of moral responsibility and artistic integrity to the new generation of television writers. In June 1975, he died of a heart attack. Today, more than twenty-five years after his death, Serling’s legacy is moving forward. His television and cinematic works have reached cult status – creating a renewed interest in one of the great early writers of American television.