March 19, 1916

Irving Wallace (March 19, 1916 to June 29, 1990) wrote more books than his children Amy and David did, although it is hard to add up separate scores since they often collaborated. In his New York Times obituary we learn of Wallace pere that he had been:

....likened...to Balzac. Some of Mr. Wallace's most devoted fans may not have read Balzac, but they put ''The Prize,'' .... on the best-seller list for many weeks. The book, a fictional account of doings behind the scenes of the Nobel Prize, was made into a movie in 1963 starring Paul Newman. ...

The bulk of Mr. Wallace's fiction made best-seller lists everywhere. At the basis of his success, according to John Leverence in his ''Irving Wallace: A Writer's Profile,'' was the way Mr. Wallace asked the same questions again and again: ''What are the unique and shared problems of male and female in our society? How can an individual endure the social, psychological, physical and financial pressures of modern life and still be whole? Above all, where is the order and sense of it all?''

But in 1960, Simon & Schuster published ''The Chapman Report,'' a novel about the impact of a sex survey on some Los Angeles suburban women. Despite some hostile reviews, it became a best seller. It was also a big money maker when it was made into a film in 1962, starring Jane Fonda, Shelley Winters and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. In addition to his own books, Mr. Wallace collaborated with his wife, Sylvia; his daughter, Amy; and his son, David Wallechinsky, ... Among their writing projects were ''The People's Almanac,'' ''The People's Almanac No. 2,'' and ''The Book of Lists.''

Significa (1983) was a family project. In the line of the List books, this volume presents a series of artificially related details, with the result that facts became tchotchkes.  As in this example from Significa:

Cats have been on the official payroll of the British Post Office for more than a century. They're not hired to sort or deliver mail, of course, but to keep it from being eaten by mice. The problem was especially bad in London in the mid-1800s....

Irving Wallace lived in Brentwood at the time of his death. I would compare him to Balzac only in terms of an automatic  facility in writing itself, and the size of the output.