The acclaimed nonfiction book Dead Air: The Night Orson Welles Terrified America by William Elliott Hazelgrove is now available as an audiobook, offering a new way to experience the story behind one of the most infamous moments in broadcasting history. The audiobook brings listeners into the events of October 30, 1938, when a 23-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air presented an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that was structured to sound like an ordinary radio broadcast interrupted by alarming news bulletins. The reports claimed that something had landed in rural New Jersey—and that the invaders were Martians. The broadcast sparked widespread panic and became a defining moment in American media history.
Hazelgrove, a national bestselling author, reconstructs the people, personalities, and media environment surrounding the broadcast, separating mythology from fact while capturing an era when radio possessed an immediacy and authority that is difficult to imagine today. The audiobook format gives the story a particularly appropriate new life, as Dead Air is a book about the extraordinary power of the spoken word—and about what can happen when millions of people hear something they believe might be real.
“Radio was the internet of 1938,” Hazelgrove said in a statement. “It was immediate, intimate, and trusted. Orson Welles understood the power of the medium, and on that October night he demonstrated just how powerful it could be.”
The book has received national attention, with coverage from The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Air Mail, and WYSO’s The Book Nook. Hazelgrove’s work has been covered by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, NPR, C-SPAN, and other national media outlets.
The audiobook edition of Dead Air is available now, offering listeners an immersive experience of a night that continues to fascinate and inform discussions about media influence, mass psychology, and the fine line between entertainment and reality.
