Harvey L. Bilker Biography
he has been a Broadway stage manager, succeeding Lillian Hellman as script reader for Herman Shumlin, original producer-director of the stage play, "Inherit the Wind."
He wrote "The Memory Machine" after graduating from Temple University Pharmacy School from which he went into medical research. The play was staged in a downtown Philadelphia theater district equivalent to New York’s Off-Broadway. It received a rave review in The Philadelphia Daily News. The story is about two slightly cracked pharmacy school research professors who invent a Rube-Goldberg type gadget that scans books and makes biochemicals of the information. These zany scientists inject a complete curriculum into a not-so-bright pharmacy student and make him a pharmacist in three weeks. This play has been updated to the status of research going on in the pharmaceutical industry today and is available for production. This satire is a science comedy for the young and old, and is available for production, as are other of his works.
Harvey L. Bilker is the author of over 50 short stories which have appeared in hardcover and paperback anthologies, and magazines. Such major publishing houses as Simon and Schuster, Putnam, Random House and Pocket Books have put his work into print. A story he wrote was the first fiction to appear in The Realist, published by Paul Krassner, who originated the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Mr. Bilker was a producer with a play written by Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted as a Hollywood screenwriter, the result of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings.
His articles have been published by newspapers, including The New York Times, in which he has also published scores of pictures as a New Jersey stringer. He has also contributed to The Times’ Camera Column in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section, and has had many front page photographs published in The New York Times and other newspapers. His work has also been in Money, TV Guide, New Jersey Monthly, Petersen’s Photographic Magazine, Popular Photography, The Elks Magazine, Meetings and Conventions, the men’s magazines, in books, and on dust jackets. They have been sent by the wire services. He was one of the eight editors of THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE—unabridged and abridged. He has been an advertising copywriter on both coasts for consumer accounts, and for medical magazines and professional journals.
The playwright has taught college as an adjunct professor. He has been an annual lecturer and workshop instructor, as has his his wife, Audrey, with whom he has often collaborated. They have also collaborated with their son, Scott, a writer and publisher. Harvey and Audrey have been awarded three citations from the New Jersey Institute of Technology Writers Conference/New Jersey Writers Hall of Fame—one for his book on photojournalism and two for their book collaborations on writing.
As a medical-professional, Mr. Bilker was in medical research at Hahnemann Medical College; a paper he co-wrote there was published by the American Physiological Society and presented in Belgium.
A pharmacist registered in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Mr. Bilker is a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry.
Currently, he has been designated a "New New Jersey Playwright" by Ocean County College, Toms River, New Jersey, upon their selection and reading of a one-act play in May, 1999. It is currently being considered for production in January, 2001.
