This week starts a brief period where these explorations are going to be shorter, for many of these authors have little biographical information available.

In the 1972 anthology, Damon Knight included an essay entitled “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye,” using the author, along with J. Harvey Haggard, as an example of an author he once read and was invested in, but whose name no longer meant anything the modern readers. At the time, both Kostkos and Haggard were alive (Haggard would be alive for another 29 years).

Henry J. Kostkos was born on June 11, 1900.

Kostkos and his wife, Mary, had two children, Miriam and Maureen. Kostkos worked for Western Electric as an electrical engineer as well as for Bell Labs in Chicago and Ohio. He worked on display mechanisms developed by Bell Labs for their associated telephone companies. At various times, he ran his own contracting business in New York and in Chicago.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kostkos seved as the secretary for the Western Electric Keany Plant, which included the role of coordinating the plant’s annual gala in Newark, New Jersey.

He began publishing science fiction in 1933 with “The Meteor-Men of Plaa,” which appeared in the August-September issue of Amazing Stories. Six more stories appeared the following year in Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories. His two part serial “Earth Rehabilitators, Consolidated” appeared in Amazing in 1935, with two more stories in 1936. One story in 1937 and a final story in Science Fiction in 1940 round out his fictional publications.

Mary died in 1975 and Kostkos died in December 1977, five years after Knight’s essay appeared. He is buried in Evergreen Memorial Gardens in Finksburg, Maryland.

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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.