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Author: Steven H Silver

Forgotten Authors: Paul W. Fairman

Forgotten Authors: Paul W. Fairman

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Paul W. Fairman

If Paul W. Fairman’s name is known, it is likely as an editor or the ghostwriter who wrote several of the juvenile novels published under Lester del Rey’s name when the latter author suffered from writers block. However, he had his own career as an author and Marvin W. Hunt commented, his “novels deserve the attention of science fiction enthusiasts not only because his books display the requisite technological prescience of good science-fiction, but especially because they are well written.”

Fairman was born on August 22, 1909 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Fairman began publishing in the February 1947 issue of Mammoth Detective with the story “Late Rain,” and in 1950 he published his first science fiction story, “No Teeth for the Tiger” in the February issue of Amazing Stories. Between 1951 and 1953, he occasionally used the housename Ivar Jorgensen, and in 1954, the film Target Earth was based on Fairman’s story “Deadly City,” which appeared under that pseudonym.  He also used the pseudonyms Robert Eggert Lee and the housename E.K. Jarvis, which was also used by Robert Moore Williams.

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Forgotten Authors: Miles J. Breuer

Forgotten Authors: Miles J. Breuer

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MIles (Miloslav) J. Breuer

Miles J. Breuer was born in Chicago on January 3, 1889, but the family moved to Crete, Nebraska when he was four years old so his father could attend medical school. He attended the University of Texas and went on to medical school at Rush Medical Center. He worked as an internist, specializing in tuberculosis at Lincoln General Hospital in Nebraska. He often bylined his work with his credentials as an M.D.

In 1916, he married Julia Strejc and they had three children, Rosalie, Stanley (who died at 18 when he fell from St. Isabel Glacier), and Mildred. During World War I, he served in France and achieved the rank of first lieutenant in the Medical Corps. Upon his return to the U.S., he joined his father’s medical practice and began publishing medical articles in Czech language newspapers and a monthly medical column in a Czech-language agricultural magazine. He published the Index of Physiotherapeutic Technic in 1925, outlining physical therapy practices.

His first English language science fiction story, “The Man with the Strange Head” appeared in the January 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, however, it was previously published as “Muž se zvláštní hlavou” in a Czech language almanac published in Chicago. He also appears to have published “The Man without an Appetite” in the Czech magazine Bratrský věstník in 1916, although it didn’t see English publication until 1963. His Czech stories tended to be published under the name Miloslav J. Breuer, and he continued to publish in Czech throughout his early writing career.

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Forgotten Authors: Nictzin Dyalhis

Forgotten Authors: Nictzin Dyalhis

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Adventure, October 10, 1922

Some science fiction authors like to cloak their histories in mystery, not content to keep the fiction in their writing. Lester Del Rey claimed he was born Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey and that his family was killed in a car crash, although his sister confirms his birth name was Leonard Knapp and the accident only killed his first wife. Nothing F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre said about himself should be trusted. Nictzin Dyalhis is another author who appeared to create his own history.

According to his draft registration card, he was born on June 4, 1873 in Massachusetts, although he also claimed to have been born in 1880 and 1879 and variously in England in Pima, Arizona. His draft registration is also the first time the name Nictzin Dyalhis appears. It also notes that he lost an eye in his childhood.

In 1912, he married Harriet Lord, who was committed to the Warren State Hospital in the late 1920s and died there in 1959. Her death certificate shows two interesting things. First, it claims her husband’s name was Fred, which could be Dyalhis’ birth name. Second, it lists her as a widow, indicating she was never divorced. Despite this, Dyalhis remarried by 1930, to Mary Sheddy, although in the 1930 census her name is given as Netulyani Dyalhis (and later claims that her birth name was Netulyani Del Torres). Nictzin and Mary had a daughter, Mary, in 1932.

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Forgotten Authors: G. Peyton Wertenbaker

Forgotten Authors: G. Peyton Wertenbaker

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G. Peyton Wertenbaker

Green Peyton Wertenbaker was born on December 23, 1907 in New Castle, Delaware. He attended the University of Virginia. After graduation, he worked as a technical writer and eventually a journalist in addition to writing fiction. During World War II, Wertenbaker services in the U.S. Navy and was later associated with the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine.

Wertenbaker married Barkley Barbee and they had one son, George.

His first story, published in Science and Invention when he was 16 in 1923, was “The Man from the Atom.” Gernsback reprinted the story three years later in the first issue of Amazing Stories. The next month, he would become the first person to publish an original story in Amazing (as well as the first repeat author), when Gernsback published his obviously titled sequel “The Man from the Atom (sequel).” Wertenbaker would go three issues for three the next month with the appearance of “The Coming of the Ice.”

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Forgotten Authors: Austin Hall

Forgotten Authors: Austin Hall

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Austin Hall

Austin Hall was born on July 27, 1880.

While working as a cowboy, Hall was asked to write a story. This led to his career as an author, writing westerns, science fiction and fantasy stories, with westerns forming the majority of his published work. A one time, Hall may have worked as a sports editor for a newspaper in San Francisco.

Following the death of Hall’s father, his mother remarried and the family appears to have moved to Ohio, in an interview published by Forrest J Ackerman in 1933, Hall claims to have attended college in Ohio and California, but no details of his academic life can be confirmed. By the time he was thirty, Hall (as well as his mother and step-father) were living back in California and Hall had married Clara Mae Stowe and they had two children, Javen and Bessie.

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Forgotten Authors: Neil R. Jones

Forgotten Authors: Neil R. Jones

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Neil R. Jones

Neil R. Jones was born on May 29, 1909 in Fulton, New York, the youngest for four children. He has stated that the first science fiction novel he read, in 1918. Was Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun, a lost world novel, which led him to the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

His first published story, “Vengeance of the Ages” was published in his high school yearbook in 1926, with a second story, “The Meteor of Fate” appearing the following year.

“The Death Head Meteor,” was his first professional publication, published in the January 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories and is believed to contain the first appearance of the word “astronaut.” He had previously sold the story “The Electrical Man,” but it didn’t appear until May of that year in Scientific Detective Monthly, earning him his first cover.

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Forgotten Authors: P. Schuyler Miller

Forgotten Authors: P. Schuyler Miller

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P. Schuyler Miller

Peter Schuyler Miller was born on February 21, 1912 in Troy, New York. He earned a Master of Science from Union College and worked as a technical writer for General Electric and the Fisher Scientific Company.

Miller had a lifelong interest in archaeology and was a member of the New York State Archaeological Association.

His first published short story “The Red Plague,” appeared in the July 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. Based on the cover of the magazine’s January issue, it was the first winner of a contest Wonder Stories ran, earning Miller publication and $150. Sam Moskowitz described the story as “more of a well-written plot synopsis for a novel than a short story.”

Miller participated in multiple collaborations. In the early 1930s, he wrote two stories with Walter Dennis and Paul McDemott: “The Red Spot of Jupiter” and “The Duel on the Asteroid.” These two stories were the only fiction Dennis and Dermott published, but Dennis was the co-editor, with Raymond A. Palmer, of The Comet, often cited as the first fanzine.

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Forgotten Authors: F. Anstey

Forgotten Authors: F. Anstey

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F. Anstey

Thomas Anstey Guthrie was born in London on August 8, 1856. He attended King’s College School and studied at Trinity Hall in Cambridge. Over the course of his career, he used multiple pseudonyms, including Hope Bandoff, William Monarch Jones, and the one most associated with his genre work, F. Anstey. He had meant to publish under his first initial and middle name, but a typo rendered the initial F and he elected to keep it.

Anstey studied law and briefly practiced beginning in 1880, but gave it up to write, with numerous short humorous pieces appearing in Punch. He was also known for writing humorous novels, the most famous of which, Vice Versa, originally published in 1882, was adapted into a play by Anstey in 1883. He similarly adapted several other of his novels and short stories into plays, as well as adapting multiple of Molière’s works into English.

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Forgotten Authors: Arthur Leo Zagat

Forgotten Authors: Arthur Leo Zagat

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Arthur Leo Zagat

Last week, I mentioned Arthur Leo Zagat, who was born in New York on February 15, 1896. He collaborated with Nat Schachner on their first eleven short stories, before they both launched solo careers. Like Schachner, Zagat attended City College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. After college, he served in World War I and studied at Bordeaux University before returning home to earn a law degree from Fordham University. He went on to found the Writers Workshop at New York University. In 1922, he married a woman Ruth Knopf and they had one daughter, Hermine.

Like Schachner, Zagat also practiced law until he decided he could make a living writing full time. In 1941, he was elected to the national executive committee of the Authors League’s pulp writers’ section.

1930 saw the start of his career as an author with the publication of “The Tower of Evil,” which he co-wrote with Nat Schachner. The two men collaborated on eleven stories published in 1931 before both turning to their solo careers as authors. Of the two, Zagat would prove to be the more  prolific, although he wrote in a wide range of genres, with his science fiction forming only a small part of his output.

 

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Forgotten Authors: Nat Schachner

Forgotten Authors: Nat Schachner

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Nat Schachner

Nat Schachner was born on January 16, 1895 in New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from City College in 1915. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I in the chemical warfare service from 1917 to 1918 and, when he returned to New York he earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence from New York University in 1919, the same year he married Helen Lichtenstein. The couple would have a daughter.  He worked as an attorney until 1933 when he became a freelance writer.

On April 4, 1930, Schachner, along with G. Edward Pendray, David Lasser, and Laurence Manning, founded the American Interplanetary Society, which would be renamed the American Rocket Society four years later. The organization designed and launched liquid fueled rockets and in 1936 the organization was awarded the Prix a’Astronautique by the Société astronomique de France.

1930 also saw the start of his career as an author with the publication of “The Tower of Evil,” which he co-wrote with Arthur Leo Zagat. The two men collaborated on eleven stories published in 1931 before both turning to their solo careers as authors.

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