Collyer Brothers - Legacy

Legacy

The New York Times, on March 26, 1947, wrote:

There is, admittedly, something unattractive about the avidity with which society now pores over every detail the Collyer brothers vigorously withheld from public scrutiny... It is almost as though society were taking revenge upon the brothers for daring to cut the thread that binds man to his fellows.

The Collyer brothers' story was first directly fictionalized by Marcia Davenport in her novel, My Brother's Keeper (Scribners, 1954), reprinted as a Popular Library paperback. Despite motion picture options spanning decades, the Davenport novel has never been filmed.

The 1995 movie Unstrung Heroes features two uncles whose lifestyle and apartment are a direct homage to the Collyer brothers. The film was based on an eponymous 1991 memoir by Franz Lidz, whose 2003 urban historical Ghosty Men (published by Bloomsbury USA) is the definitive history of the Collyers. Ghosty Men also chronicles the parallel life of Arthur Lidz, the hermit uncle featured in Unstrung Heroes. Uncle Arthur grew up near the Collyer mansion and was inspired by the brothers.

Since the 1960s, the site of the former Collyer house has been a pocket park, named for the brothers.

A "Collyer's Mansion" is a modern firefighting term for a dwelling of hoarders that is so filled with trash and debris it becomes a serious danger to the occupants and emergency responders.

In 2002, playwright Richard Greenberg released The Dazzle, which told a story loosely based on the brothers' lives after their parents' deaths, leading up to their own death. In the play, Homer dies before Langley, and the two fall in love with the same woman. The author's note in the beginning of the play claims "The Dazzle is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know almost nothing."

In September 2009, Random House released E. L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley, a work of historical fiction which speculates on the brothers' inner lives. Taking considerable historical liberties, the novel extends their lifespans into the late 1970s and switches the brothers' birth order.