Kenneth Atchity

Kenneth John Atchity was born on 16 January 1944 in Eunice, Louisiana, the son of Fred J. and Myrza (née Aguillard) Atchity. His Louisiana roots stayed with him: he later wrote Cajun Household Wisdom (1995) and used Aguillard, his mother's maiden name, in the pen name Andrea Aguillard.

He received a Jesuit education at Rockhurst High School and at Georgetown University, where he was a member of the Philodemic Society, held an Ignatian Scholarship to study Greek and Latin classics, and took his bachelor's degree in philosophy and classical Greek. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship took him to Yale University, where he earned a master's degree and a PhD in comparative literature. His dissertation, Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory, was awarded the John Addison Porter Prize and was published in 1978 by Southern Illinois University Press with an introduction by John Gardner.

Atchity began as an academic. He became a professor of literature and classics at Occidental College in Los Angeles and chaired its comparative literature department, served as a Fulbright professor of American studies at the University of Bologna, and taught in the UCLA Writers Program. He wrote frequently for The Los Angeles Times Book Review and published scholarship on Homer, Dante, Spenser and Italian literature, including the edited volumes Eterne in Mutabilitie: The Unity of the Faerie Queene (1972) and Italian Literature: Roots and Branches (1976), and later The Renaissance Reader, The Classical Greek Reader and The Classical Roman Reader. With Marsha Kinder he co-founded and edited Dreamworks, an interdisciplinary journal of dreams and the arts. He also wrote the libretto In Praise of Love for a choral symphony premiered at Lincoln Center in 1974.

In 1976 he founded L/A House, a consulting, publishing and development company whose work extended his creative writing teaching into manuscript consultation, magazines and eventually television. From 1985 it developed Shades of Love, a series of 16 feature length romantic television films produced in 1986 and 1987 with Atchity as executive producer. Distributed internationally by Lorimar, Astral-Bellevue-Pathé and Warner Bros. International, the films premiered in the United States on Cinemax and HBO and were nominated for Canada's Gemini Award. Having left his tenured post, he described the move in his book The Mercury Transition (1994), later revised as How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream.

In 1989 he sold L/A House and founded AEI, Atchity Editorial/Entertainment International, a literary management and motion picture production company. AEI represented Steve Alten's novel Meg, selling it to Bantam Doubleday and the film rights in Hollywood; the long-developing adaptation reached cinemas as The Meg in 2018, starring Jason Statham, with Atchity credited as associate producer, followed by Meg 2: The Trench in 2023. His other producing credits included Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (1989), Falling Over Backwards (1990), Joe Somebody (2001) with Tim Allen, Life or Something Like It (2002) with Angelina Jolie, Gospel Hill (2008), Hysteria (2011) and The Lost Valentine (2011) with Betty White and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The Discovery documentary The Kennedy Detail (2010), based on a book by his clients Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin, earned him an Emmy nomination in 2011.

He founded The Writer's Lifeline in 1996 and later Story Merchant, Story Merchant Books and Atchity Productions, and in 2006 joined investors in acquiring the Louisiana Wave Studio in Shreveport, a tank built for filming waves. He wrote widely used guides for writers, among them A Writer's Time (W. W. Norton, 1986), Writing Treatments That Sell with Chi-Li Wong, How to Publish Your Novel (2005) and Sell Your Story to Hollywood (2017). In 2012 he published his completion of William Diehl's thriller Seven Ways to Die and his first solo novel, The Messiah Matrix. In December 2025 Deadline named him among the producers of Mr. Irrelevant, a football film written by Steve Alten and Terry George.

Atchity was married to Kayoko Mitsumatsu, a documentary filmmaker and former producer for the Japanese broadcaster NHK. He had two children. He lived in Los Angeles, and his memberships included the Producers Guild of America, the Television Academy, the American Comparative Literature Association and the Academy of American Poets.

Kenneth Atchity died on 19 October 2026, aged 82. His death was recorded in an online obituary published by the Neptune Society in Sherman Oaks, California, which gave his dates as 16 January 1944 to 19 October 2026 and said he had lived in Los Angeles. The cause of death was not made public, and no services had been scheduled at the time the obituary appeared.

Atchity's career bridged two worlds that rarely meet: the Yale classicist who wrote on Homer and Dante became a Hollywood literary manager who championed genre fiction, most famously Steve Alten's Meg, which became a two-film Warner Bros. franchise. Through AEI, Story Merchant and The Writer's Lifeline, and through books such as A Writer's Time and Writing Treatments That Sell, he coached generations of writers on turning manuscripts into books and films. His own leap from tenure into the entertainment business, which he wrote about at length, remained central to the advice he gave others.