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George R. Stewart's books about U.S. highways were based on his cross-country drives in 1924, 1949 and 1950.

George Rippey Stewart (May 31, 1895 – August 22, 1980) was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley (until 1962).

Born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Stewart was educated at Princeton University, the University of California, and Columbia University.

He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's The Stand, as King has stated.^[1]

His 1941 novel Storm, featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called "Maria," prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms^[2] and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon. Storm was dramatized as A Storm Called Maria on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland.

Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.

• Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party (1936)
• Doctor's Oral (1939)
• Storm (1941)
• Names on the Land (1945), a study on the etymology of American place-names
• Man, An Autobiography (1946)
• Fire (1948)
• Earth Abides (1949)
• U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America (1953)
• American Ways of Life (1954)
• The Years of the City (1955)
• N.A. 1: The North-South Continental Highway (1957)
• Pickett's Charge (1959)
• The California Trail (1962)
• Not So Rich as You Think (1968)
• A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970)
• Names on the Globe (1975)

• "George R. Stewart, toponymist," Names, Volume 24, 1976, pp. 77-85.

1. ^ Dodds, Georges T. George R. Stewart (sidebar). Retrieved on 2007-06-12.
2. ^ Naming Hurricanes (National Hurricane Center). Retrieved on 2007-06-12.

• OTR Network Library: Escape: "Earth Abides," parts one and two

• American Name Society biography of Stewart by William Bright
• Donald M. Scott: "George R. Stewart: The Man Who Named the Wind"