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Forgotten Authors: Howard Schoenfeld

Forgotten Authors: Howard Schoenfeld

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Howard Schoenfeld

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.

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Forgotten Authors: Hal K. Wells

Forgotten Authors: Hal K. Wells

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Hal K.Wells

Harold  Kerton Wells, who wrote as Hal K. Wells, was born on September 2, 1899 in Little Hocking, Ohio and grew up there and in the nearby town of Belpre, both along the Ohio River border with West Virginia.

He enlisted in the Ohio National Guard of May 18, 1917 and served in the infantry and field artillery during World War I, eventually being discharged on July 27, 1918 with a certificate of disability. He returned to Ohio and settled in Athens, about 35 miles away from where he grew up, and took a job working as a clerk for a dry goods store.

By 1930, he had left Ohio to move to Los Angeles and was publishing articles in Motion Picture Magazine, beginning in 1927. He also wrote the film A Moony Mariner, which was made in 1927 starring Billy Dooley, Vera Steadman, and Billy Engle. The film is the story of a sailor who is sent to the moon, but instead his rocket lands in a nearby Turkish bath, which he takes to be the moon.

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Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

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Richard Tooker

Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.

After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.

His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

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Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

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Robert Arthur

Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.

Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.

After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.

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Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

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Margaret Irwin

Margaret Irwin was born on March 27, 1889 in Highgate Hill, London to Andrew Clarke and Anna Julia (nee Baker) Irwin. Her father was originally from Perth, Australia. After her mother’s death in 1899 and her father’s death in 1902, Irwin was sent to be raised by her uncle, Sidney T. Irwin, a classics professor at Clifton College in Bristol. She was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol and went on to study at Oxford, where she took a degree in English.  Her uncle died in 1911.

Irwin’s earliest novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, was published in 1913 and was followed by a couple more novels in the teens before she hit her stride in the 1920s. Her 1924 novel Still She Wished for Company was a fantasy novel in which an occultist drew the heroine into 1779. It was followed a year later by These Mortals about a woman raised in isolation in a magical palace. Although she continued to, occasionally write short fiction with fantastic elements, such as “Monsieur Seeks a Wife” and “The Curate and the Rake,” the majority of her writing was historical fiction, for which she became well known.

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Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

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John Lymington

John Lymington was born on April 21, 1911 in London, England. His birth name was John Richard Newton Chance. His father was Dick Chance, who served as the managing editor of Amalgamated Press. Raised in London, he attended a private school and then went on to technical college with the intention of becoming a civil engineer or quantity surveyor (insert Ethel the Aardvark).  Instead, by 1932, he decided to work full time as a writer.

He learned to fly in 1928 and during World War II served as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, based out of the Cotswolds. He served there, overseeing training at three different airfields until 1943, when he was given indefinite leave and eventually invalided out of the service as a flight lieutenant. Around the time he was put on leave, he met Shirley Savill, who was serving as a WAAF section officer and the two married on July 22, 1943.  Following the war, they settled in Hampshire, where they had three sons. By 1956, they had moved to the Isle of Wight, where Lymington managed a pub.

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Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

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Charles Carroll Muñoz (a.k.a. T.P. Caravan)

T.P. Caravan was born Charles Carroll Muñoz on July 2, 1926 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were O.A. and Constance (née Stoutenburgh) Muñoz.

During World War II, Muñoz served in the United States Navy as an aerial gunner, flying in Avenger bombers. When the war was over, he remained in the U.S. Merchant Marines, serving as a radio officer on freighters, tankers, and passenger ships. He also served during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars on munitions ships.

He earned his Master’s degree from Columbia in 1953 with a thesis about the eighteen century English poet Edward Young. In 1952, while attending Columbia University, he began publishing science fiction under the Caravan name with the short story “Happy Solution,” which appeared in the January issue of Other Worlds. Several other science fiction stories followed over the next thirteen years, including seven sequels to “Happy Solution.”

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Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

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Carl Selwyn

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.

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Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

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Fantastic Adventures, October 1950, cover by Robert Gibson Jones

Dave Dryfoos was born on March 29, 1915 in San Francisco, California to Jesse and Beatrice (née Goodman) Dryfoos. He attended Lowell High School and attained the rank of Eagle Scott before attending the University of California at Berkeley.  He earned a law degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law before being admitted to the bar in 1936.

In 1942, Dryfoos married Dorothea Gallatin and shortly afterwards was drafted into the Army, serving in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines during World War II before being mustered out in 1946 as a staff sergeant. He returned to Benicia California after the war.

Dryfoos published his first short story in the October 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures: “Lest Ye Be Judged…” Over the next six years, he published twenty-one additional short stories, including “Some Like It Cold,” “The Old-Fashioned Spaceman,” and “Younger by the Minute.” His work appeared in Galaxy, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as several other magazines. He stopped published in 1955 with “Seller of the Sky,” which appeared in the February issue of If.

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Forgotten Authors: Edwin K. Sloat

Forgotten Authors: Edwin K. Sloat

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Edwin K. Sloat

Edwin K. Sloat was born on March 1, 1895 in Denmark, Iowa.

The attended State Normal College in Edmond, Oklahoma (now University of Central Oklahoma), graduating in 1916. Following his graduation, he worked as a newspaperman, an employee of the post office, and as a band leader during World War I, in which he was a Musician 1st Class Petty Officer.

After the war, he married Corinne Evelyn Lake in 1922 and they had two sons, Jerry and Donald.

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