Howard Schoenfeld was born on January 2, 1915 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He attended the University of Syracuse. For Christmas in 1933, he visited Manhattan for the first time and a year later moved to Greenwich Village, where he got a job an editor for See magazine, a photo magazine and as deputy editor-in-chief for Uncensored. He also worked as a public relations officer for the Workers’ Defense League.

Schoenfeld refused to register for the draft in 1940, stating that he was a pacifist and that peacetime conscription was unlawful. He wound up spending 11 months in prison before being paroled to serve an additional seven months at a Quaker work camp for conscientious objectors. Schoenfeld wrote about his experiences in “The Danbury Story,” and went on to write a political column for The Conscientious Objector.

Perhaps his most famous story, “The Universal Panacea,” was published in the winter 1949 issue of Retort and later reprinted as “Built Up Logically” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as other places. It was also adapted for radio, Other fantasy stories included “Built Down Logically,” “All of God’s Children Got Shoes,” and “Fillmore Y. Brightforks.” In addition to writing fantasy, he also wrote crime and mystery stories which were published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

In 1953, Schoenfeld briefly lived in southern California, where he worked on the television series Atom Squad, about a top-secret planetary defense organization faced with challenges from evildoers and malfunctioning machines alike. Within a year, he moved back to Greenwich Village.

His novel, Let Them Eat Bullets was published in 1954 and is a spoof on the hard-boiled detective novel.

Schoenfeld married Dorothy Brigstock and in 1960, they had a son, Jason. Jason would become a filmmaker, conducting interviews with Greenwich Village residents in the late 1990s, which were aired as “Famous x 2.” During the 1960s and 1970s, Schoenfeld spent time in Washington Square playing a ball game called burnout with the poet Delmore Schwartz, the painter Brian Adam, and the musician Bob Dylan.

Schoenfeld died of liver failure on September 26, 2004 and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Shortly after his death, a collection of eight of his stories, called True and Almost True Stories, was published. It includes nine science fiction and fantasy stories as well as several mysteries and some memoirs.

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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.