Earl Hamner, Jr.

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Earl Henry Hamner, Jr. (born on July 10, 1923 in Schuyler, Virginia) is an American television writer and producer (sometimes credited as Earl Hamner), best known for his work in the 1970s and 1980s on the long-running CBS series The Waltons and Falcon Crest. As a novelist, he is best known for the novel Spencer's Mountain, which was inspired by his own childhood and formed the basis for both the film of the same name and the television series The Waltons, for which he provided voiceover narration.

He based the cantankerous Walton family grandparents in the popular television series on his own maternal Italian-American grandparents, Ora Lee and Colonel Anderson Gianniny, an anglicized version of the Italian surname "Giannini".