Harrison Parker Tyler, better known as Parker Tyler (born 6 March 1904, New Orleans - died in June 1974, New York City of prostate cancer) was an American author, poet, and film critic. Tyler lived with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse (1926-1994) from 1945 until his death.
He co-authored The Young and Evil (Obelisk Press, 1933) with Charles Henri Ford, an energetically experimental novel with obvious debts to fellow Villager Djuna Barnes, and also to Gertrude Stein. Tyler and Ford co-edited the Surrealist magazine View until it folded in 1947.
A writer for the journal Film Culture, Tyler is one of the few film critics to write extensively on experimental film and underground film. His Screening the Sexes (1972) is thought to be the first book-length study of homosexuality in film. Other books of film criticism by Tyler include The Hollywood Hallucination (1944), Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947), Classics of Foreign Film (1962), Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (1969), and The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building (1973).
Tyler's books became popular -- and some old titles reissued after being out-of-print for years -- after Tyler was mentioned several times in the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal.
