Marion Hargrove


Marion Hargrove was an American writer.

Biography

He is noted for the World War II bestselling book See Here, Private Hargrove, a collection of humorous newspaper columns written mostly before the United States entered the war. During the war, he served on the staff of Yank, the Army Weekly. After the war he wrote two novels: Something's Got to Give and The Girl He Left Behind. He also wrote for various popular magazines, and served as feature editor of Argosy.
A native of Mount Olive, North Carolina, in 1955 Hargrove settled in Los Angeles and began writing television and film scripts. His credits include Cash McCall, The Music Man, and television episodes of Maverick, The Restless Gun, Colt.45, Zane Grey Theater, the pilot script for 77 Sunset Strip entitled Girl on the Run, The Rogues, I Spy, The Name of the Game, Nichols, The Waltons, and Bret Maverick. Collaborator Roy Huggins discusses Hargrove at length in part 6 of his Archive of American Television videotaped interview. Hargrove was one of three Hollywood writers interviewed and analyzed at length in Prime Time Authorship, by Douglas Heil. While working at Warner Bros. in 1959, he was the center of a successful grass-roots letter-writing campaign to acquire a suitable couch for his office on the studio lot. A selection of these letters was published in Playboy Magazine under the title Hollywood Horizontal and anthologized in The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire.
In 1965, Hargrove attempted to mold a television series after See Here, Private Hargrove, with Peter Helm in the starring role. The pilot was produced but never sold.