#richard hooker

[mashhistorian]

Happy birthday, Dr. H. Richard Hornberger Jr. (1924 - 1997), MASH surgeon in the Korean War and author of the original M*A*S*H novel (written under the pen name Richard Hooker)

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker (1968)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJul 29, 2025

[mash4077confessions]

Are episodes where Alan Alda wrote or directed MASH technically self insert fan fic?

I guess you could look at it that way. Richard Hooker, the guy who wrote the book that the movie and show were based upon, was the real Hawkeye Pierce. So that was also very much a self insert. He and Alan Alda had very different beliefs and so the Hawkeye in that we all know and love was not at all Richard Hooker's image of himself/ the character.

[thecatwhosavedbooks]

I don't think I can describe to you, just how much I loved reading this for the first time in 2023. I keep using this book for some light reading.

It has exactly the same vibe as the movie and tv show.

[petertqrk]

— Richard Hooker & W.C. Heinz, M*A*S*H: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

[mash-notes]

Sometimes You Heart the Bullet: Season 11 Overview

We did it. The totality of our beloved TV series lies before us, in all its splendor—the roaring choppers, the bloody gowns, the wily nurses and bloviating generals. The franchise that began fifteen years ago with Richard Hooker’s thin novel is at its conclusion, and we can’t help imagining what Duke Forrest would think, if he could see us now.

The truth is that, in the hands of Larry Gelbart, Burt Metcalfe, Gene Reynolds, Alan Alda, and their team of writers the shaggy-dog war story became one of the most important things in pop culture history. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every sitcom that followed has striven for MASH’s level of quality, and most for its trailblazing mixture of humor and drama. Few have succeeded.

The 4077th gets a deluxe last hurrah. Stuff goes into a time capsule for future generations to find. Chuck gets a French girlfriend and Margaret sports a perm to rival Mrs. Roper’s. BJ gets half his mustache shaved off. Guest stars include everyone from George Wendt to Jeffrey Tambor to Marilyn Monroe (not really) to Andrew Dice Clay (really).

If you’re like me, you’ve looked at the Wikipedia entry for season 11 and ended at “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the movie-length MASH finale. At the time of this writing (February 2019) its summary is a paragraph long, written in dry, spare sentences. I cannot read it without tearing up. While the legend of all the toilets in New York flushing simultaneously as the credits rolled is probably not true, the show still stands as the most-watched TV episode of all time. And guys, it’s not easy to sit through, either.

Here, finally, is one last testament to the genius of MASH: the finale is horrible. Not in execution or writing or anything to do with its success as a piece of cinema; obviously GFA is extremely good from a critic’s perspective. What makes it horrible is that it’s merciless, brutal, and cruel, like war itself. After a season of typical highs and lows, some of them downright cute, and not too much sentimentality, the finale shows us once and for all the hell of war. When the war is over it wants to leave an indelible impression, an indelible message. This is not romantic, and one should never return.

But, fools that we are, we return again and again. We love these personnel too much not to.

[heroofthreefaces]

After drawing that diagram of the M*A*S*H hospital building tonight, I’ve taken it into my head to just post some of my archived content that I never get to use any more now that alt.tv.mash is dead. 

on M*A*S*H novels There are two kinds of novels in the collection of M*A*S*H novels.

Richard Hooker alone (or, I've occasionally read, with a ghost writer) wrote M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, and M*A*S*H Mania. These are episodic tales of madcap medical mayhem with quasi-technical surgery scenes. M*A*S*H is set in the Korean War, and was published in the sixties. The other two are set in Hooker's beloved rural Maine as Hawkeye, Duke, Trapper John, and Spearchucker practice surgery together from the 50s through the mid-70s; Maine and Mania were published at either end of the 70s respectively. Mania is told in first person by a character the other characters address as “Hook” who also was a 4077th alumnus.

Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth (a pseudonym for W.E.B. Griffin, or vice versa) co-wrote approximately a dozen novels published and set in the mid-70s. Some readers question whether Hooker was really involved in them but at least the first one has a quasi-technical surgery scene. They're all titled M*A*S*H Goes To [some exotic location, often overseas], and are all non-episodic farces featuring mistaken identities, intercontinental airliner chases, and contemporary public figures - or satires of them - made to look foolish. Hawkeye and Trapper John appear in each of them, and all feature reunions with past personnel or patients of the 4077th. Hot Lips (now Reverend Mother Emeritus Margaret Houlihan Wauchauf Wilson, R.N., Lt. Col., USA Ret., of the God Is Love In All Forms Christian Church, Inc.) and Father Mulcahy (now an archbishop and the Pope's chess and beer buddy) appear in almost all the novels. The world’s greatest opera singer, an insufferable egotist who unfortunately is pretty much correct and who hangs out with a portly Arab prince, and a Cajun swampdweller who discovered oil on his land are former 4077th patients who appear in most or all the novels. Henry Blake is a general and C.O. of Walter Reed Army Hospital. Radar is CEO of his own fast-food empire and marries the world’s greatest opera singer’s opera singer sister. The Painless Pole is a henpecked fat old dentist in Michigan. Frank Burns is still a small doctor in a small town.

Hooker didn't like the tv series because it offended his conservatism. Both the Hooker/Butterworth novels and the last Hooker novel took occasional jabs at the tv series, especially for killing off Henry Blake. On almost the final page of his final novel, M*A*S*H Mania, Hooker has General Blake pay a visit to Crabapple Cove on the date of the airing of Abyssinia, Henry. 

[malesoulmakeup]

M*A*S*H by Robert Altman Richard Hooker