Carl Selwyn Pugh, Jr. was born on December 12, 1918 on Roanoke Island, North Carolina to Carl Selwyn Pugh and Amelia (née Myatt). He was the first of two sons.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he edited the college humor magazine. After college, he moved to New York where he attempted to sell jokes to humor magazines, achieved a small amount of success, but not enough to sustain himself.

During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and after the war he worked as a scenario writer at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, writing military training films.

His science fiction, published using the name Carl Selwyn, appeared during and immediately after World War II, with his first story, “The Strange Death of Richard Sefton,” being published in the January 1940 issue of Amazing Stories. his next story, “Revolt on the Earth-Star” was his debut in Planet Stories, where most of his fiction appeared.

Oddly, in a 1947 issue of Planet Stories, a biographical article states his first appearance in the magazine was the 1944 story “Citadel of Death.” That article also states that he was born on December 12, 1917, although official sources place his birth a year later. His final science fiction story, “Earth Is Missing” appeared in the same issue of Planet Stories as the biographical article. Over the course of his seven year career as a science fiction author, Selwyn published 10 short stories.

He married Jean Haydock on February 17, 1951. Haydock worked at Prentice-Hall. The couple had three children, Carla, Carl (born in 1954), and John. The 1947 biographical article, which was published four years before his marriage to Jean, notes that he married a woman who attended Vasser (which Jean did), who divorced him around the time he finished OCS, indicating that Jean may have been a second wife.

In his 1947 Planet Stories biography, Selwyn claimed that he accepted a job at M.G.M. in Hollywood, although there is no other evidence this occurred or that one of his uncles worked for MGM. He did, however, write films for the United States Information Agency and various businesses, including Pan Am and J.C. Penney.

Selwyn died in Miami Beach, Florida on June 29, 1984 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Smithfield, North Carolina.

 

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-two-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.