The Stories of Francis Stevens-Claimed!-Part Three

May 11, 2015, 3:00 am

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I can see now that Francis Stevens had certain themes and ideas to which she returned again and again. You will find them in "Claimed!":

Dr. Vanaman is a physician, a man of science and reason. His explanations for the phenomena he encounters are material. "All material objects," he pontificates, "are subject to material law. That is axiomatic." Vanaman clings to that idea until it becomes entirely untenable. As before, Francis Stevens writes a kind of science fantasy in which she offers a scientific or materialistic way out for her readers, but it's clear that the reality in her stories is non-material, being either psychological, supernatural, spiritual, or some combination of the three. It's clear also that her sympathies lie there.

As a related theme, Francis Stevens was interested in altered states of consciousness (including drug-induced states that are absent in "Claimed!"). Here is a telling quote: "Since the moment when he [Vanaman] found himself left at the wharf, and his brain had cleared of that obsessing stupor, all the supernormal quality of the affair had seemed to grow steadily more questionable, fading to unreality like the uncertain memory of a dream--illusion--hallucination; three words that cover a multitude of otherwise inexplicable phenomena."

Even though she wrote for pulp magazines, Francis Stevens also wrote for a middle-class or upper middle-class readership. Her stories are mostly about that lifestyle--lawyers, doctors, politicians, big businessmen, big houses, servants, etc. Her low characters are pretty low, as in the sailor Jim Blair. A long time ago, I read a book called Mimesis by Erich Auerbach (1946). I understood very little of it and remember less, but I do remember that Auerbach made the point that the Bible is remarkable for being about ordinary people and their ordinary lives, whereas most of world literature was about kings and princes, warriors and heroes. That attention to the upper levels of society has come through even to the present day, although there has been more attention to the lower levels of society at least since the 1930s and '40s, for example in the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell (1932, 1934, 1935) and The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1949). I'll have more to say about that in my next interminable series, which involves William Gibson, Hugo Gernsback, Blade Runner, and a book called Trousered Apes, among other things.

The idea is that Francis Stevens invented dark fantasy. "Claimed!" is only further evidence that she did not. It's a somewhat darker story than its predecessors to be sure, and there is in fact a god in the story, a god "older than life" and beyond human comprehension. But here again, there is a difference between her gods and those created by H.P. Lovecraft for instance. Cthulhu is hostile to or indifferent towards human beings. We aren't really very important in his scheme of reconquering earth. He's kind of like the Vogons in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who destroy our planet so as to construct an intergalactic highway. In contrast, humanity is central to the concerns of Francis Stevens' gods. In "Claimed!", the unnamed god who wants the green casket returned to him once loved the people of the ten scarlet cities and considered them his children. He bestowed upon them great power. In his own words:

"Thus the secret knowledge was kept by the ten kings, descendants of my first sons, who only had access to it. Till drinking too deep of power and ease and wealth, they grew drunken and presumptuous. Content no more to name themselves sons of a god, they forgot their mortality of flesh and believed themselves gods indeed.

"They disclaimed their debt of love. They turned against me and would have enslaved me also by the secret words of power I had taught them. Then I knew that I had done wrong, for men are small and foolish, not worthy of so great power nor fitted to wield it. In my anger I rocked the earth. It opened beneath their cities. The eternal fires were disturbed and burst forth from the mountains."

That's an old story, the story of Noah or Lot, biblical in its language, imagery, and theme. You might say that the green casket holds the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (or the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything). Men are incapable of having that kind of power. That's why their god destroyed them in Atlantis and why he wants the casket returned to him now. Unlike Cthulhu, he is a god who loves--or loved--his people. He is not the indifferent or hostile god of dark fantasy, and he recognizes the goodness in the two future lovers and so stays his hand from destroying them. Cthulhu would do no such thing.

And those words strike me as an image of the world of today:

. . . drinking too deep of power and ease and wealth, they grew drunken and presumptuous. Content no more to name themselves sons of a god, they forgot their mortality of flesh and believed themselves gods indeed.

That pride earned them destruction. What will it earn us?

Claimed by Francis Stevens, with cover art by Gray Morrow, in the Avalon Books edition of 1966.

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The Stories of Francis Stevens-Serapion

May 12, 2015, 3:00 am

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"Serapion" by Francis Stevens was first published as a four-part serial in The Argosy from June 19 to July 10, 1920, then reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries Combined with Fantastic Novels Magazine nearly a generation later, in July 1942. It is a novella in length, and in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004), "Serapion" takes up ninety-five pages.

I have not yet read "Sunfire," Francis Stevens' last published story, but it's hard for me to imagine that it will surpass "Serapion." Sophisticated, profound, tightly written, carefully composed, singular in its purpose, and inexorable in its movement towards a powerful conclusion, "Serapion" must be considered one of Francis Stevens' highest achievements as a writer. It's hard for me to believe that it was published in a pulp magazine or that a pulp readership would have found it of real interest. And yet it was reprinted in a pretty pulpy pulp, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, in 1942.

The plot of "Serapion" is pretty straightforward: Nils Berquist introduces his friend, Clay Barbour, to two spiritualists, James Barton Moore and his wife, a pallid and enervated hothouse flower named Alicia. During a séance at the Moores' house, Barbour becomes aware of what he calls a "Fifth Presence," an entity soon known to him by the name Serapion. The nature of Serapion is uncertain. His presence distresses Barbour, but he also wishes--or says he wishes--Barbour to be happy and well loved. To that end--ultimately his own ends--Serapion begins to manipulate events in the lives of Barbour and his associates. Every one of them meets a tragic end, only . . .

In his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, Gary Hoppenstand writes:

"Serapion" is, to my mind, Stevens' best story among her shorter fiction [and] is her most sophisticated tale. . . . [T]he warning, stated early in the narrative that 'there are entities and forces dangerous to the human race outside of what we call the natural world,' decidely confirms the fundamental ideology of dark fantasy. . . . [Stevens] concocts a marvelously problematic ending for both the possessed [Barbour] and the possessor [Serapion]. Neither evil nor good wins in the end of her morally ambivalent tale, nothing that simple here. (p. xxiii)

I agree with Dr. Hoppenstand that this is one of Stevens' best and most sophisticated tales. I also agree that there is nothing simple in its conclusion. I disagree with everything in between.

First, that warning--"there are entities and forces dangerous to the human race outside of what we call the natural world"--does not confirm "the fundamental ideology of dark fantasy." On the contrary, "Serapion" is suffused with Christian thought and imagery. Its "fundamental ideology," if you want to call it that, is not of dark fantasy but of Christian theology. And there is nothing that is "decidedly . . . dark fantasy" about it--"Serapion" is Francis Stevens' most Christian tale. In fact it's one of the most Christian of all genre stories I have read.

Second, the story is not morally ambivalent. There is ambivalence in the entity Serapion--as you're reading, you're not sure what he's up to or whether he's good or bad--but by the end you know the truth and you can have no sympathy for him. And although it's true that "[n]either evil nor good wins in the end," you're pretty certain which way things will go, and it's not in favor of evil. Sorry, fans of dark fantasy. Once again you will be disappointed.

As in The Citadel of Fear (Nacoc Yaotl) and "Claimed!" (an unnamed Poseidon-like god referred to as "the scarlet archangel"), Francis Stevens used in "Serapion" a pagan god as her nemesis. That name, Serapion, evokes the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, who was depicted in statuary as holding a scepter, with Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld, at his feet, and perhaps significantly, a snake also coiled there. (1, 2) In both of the previous stories, love and human goodness foil these pagan gods (with help from other forces). Those forces, including love and goodness, are still at work in "Serapion," but all adornment is stripped away to reveal the Christian God as the force foiling the title character. Francis Stevens wrote just one more published story after "Serapion." We might wonder why and assign her silence to some unknown biographical fact. I wonder now if she had simply said all she had to say in the best way she could.

So I would like to offer evidence from "Serapion":

The spiritualist Jimmy Moore probes Berquist, a skeptic on spiritualism: "Still clinging to sacred barriers, eh?"

"The barriers exist, and they are sacred [Berquist replies] . . . . I do not believe that you or others like you can tear them down. If I did, I should be justified in taking your life, as though you were any other dangerous criminal. When those barriers go down, chaos will swallow the world, and the race of men be superseded by the race of madmen!"

Moore retorts: "In the world of science . . . what one can do, one may do." (p. 251) Though a spiritualist, Moore is actually the scientific half of a team, his wife being the spiritual half. It's a dichotomy--material vs. non-material--that runs through Francis Stevens' work. Moore, a materialist, continues: "How do you know that your soul, as you call it, isn't just another finer form of matter?" (p. 252)

Clay Barbour, the narrator, explores his character further: "James Barton Moore . . . . had, moreover, one characteristic of a certain type of scientist in less weird fields. He would have put a stranger or a friend on the vivisectionary table, could he by that means have hoped to acquire one small modicum of the knowledge he sought." (pp. 264-265) Being a materialist, Moore is of course unbound by morality--"what one can do, one may do"--and in that he sounds suspiciously like a psychopath. He also sounds like Aleister Crowley, who famously said, "Do what thou wilt."

"There is power in a name," says Alicia (p. 306), a power that Francis Stevens used in her stories, where proper nouns have such meaning and significance. Clay Barbour for instance carries as his middle name the full name of his possessor, Serapion. He also disclaims his middle name, saying instead that it is Samuel. Serapion is the name of a demon. Samuel is literally "the name of God." The name Clay is self-explanatory, for the man of clay is caught between God and the devil.

Serapion, a charmer and seducer, speaks true-lies to Barbour: "There is but one invincible power, offered by God to man, and which God has commanded man to use . . . . Love! Armored in love, your life will be a sacred, guarded joy to you. Believe me! I am older than I appear, and wiser than I am old. Guided by me, guarded by love, you have a beautiful future at your command." (p. 316)

Nils Berquist, initially a socialist and an idealist, slowly converts over the course of the story and finally takes the fall for a crime committed by his friend:

"You believe in God and His justice? You?" [Barbour asks.]

"Most solemnly--most earnestly--as I never knew Him nor His justice before, Clayton, lad. Why, I'm happy! Do I seem so tragically sad to you?"

"No. But you seem different from any living man. You look like--I have seen the picture of a man with that light on his face."

"So?"

"He was nailed to a cross." (p. 337)

Finally, Serapion, who is truthful to himself if no one else and who calls himself "the angel-drowned-in-mire" among other epithets, possesses Clay Barbour completely--or almost completely:

"I have absorbed his being: yes!" [writes Serapion.] "But in the very face of victory I, who never had a conscience, have paid a bitter price for the new lease of life in the flesh that I coveted. . . . And my punishment is this: that you [Barbour] are not content, and I know now that you never will be. Year by year you, who were weak have grown stronger; day by day, even hour by hour, you are tightening the grip that draws me into your own cursed circle of conscience-stricken misery. . . . Is it true then? After all these years must the long, bright shadow of Nils Berquist's cross touch and save me even against my will? Must I, Clayton-Serapion, the dual soul made one, surrender at last and myself take up the awful burden God lays on those he loves?"

And then the final sentence in the story: "First painful step on that road, I have confessed." (pp. 341-342)

So, can we put to rest the demonstrably false and terribly misguided idea that Francis Stevens invented or worked in the genre of dark fantasy? She was unquestionably Christian, I suspect a Catholic. In her stories, the forces pressing in upon humanity from the outside are not material at all but spiritual, malicious, and as old as time itself. And in her stories, the world will not meet Gary Hoppenstand's "terrible end" (p. xxiv) but will go on under the watchful eyes of a loving God. This is not nihilism. It is faith, and I would wager, truth.

Notes

(1) The image of a Middle Eastern god or demon from The Exorcist (1973) leaps to mind.
(2) The word serapion seems to have been Francis Stevens' invention. In the ancient world, a serapeum was a temple dedicated to Serapis. There is evidence in the story that Barbour's namesake, his uncle Serapion, was also possessed by the demon, in which case the idea of the body as a temple of God takes on some ambiguity. Or it could be that the word Serapion is meant to signify a follower or devotee of Serapis. In any case, Francis Stevens seems to have invoked pagan gods for the nemeses in her stories.

Argosy, June 19, 1920, with "Serapion" by Francis Stevens as the cover story. The male character is Nils Berquist, not the narrator and protagonist Clay Barbour. The cover artist is unknown.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, July 1942, with cover art by Virgil Finlay. The "dead-alive house" is the house of the spiritualists, James and Alicia Moore.

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The Stories of Francis Stevens-Sunfire

May 13, 2015, 3:00 am

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Finally I'm back to Weird Tales.

"Sunfire" was Francis Stevens' last published story. After its appearance as a two-part serial in Weird Tales (July-Sept. 1923), she fell silent. If "Serapion" was the climax of her career, "Sunfire" was a denouement, and, I'm sorry to say, not a very memorable one. It is a long short story or short novella and runs to sixty-one pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (an inaccurate subtitle by the way).

"Sunfire," originally entitled "Fire of Noon," is a straightforward narrative that reads like the plot of an adventure movie. As a tale of Lost Worlds, it hearkens back to Stevens' first story, "The Nightmare," from just six years before. In its description of a complicated physical environment--a pyramid-island in a high Amazonian lake or lagoon--"Sunfire" has similarities to "The Labyrinth" and The Citadel of Fear. Also like "The Nightmare," the nemesis is a cryptozoological creature, in this case a monstrous centipede. The powerful themes of her middle stories--love vs. hate, spirit vs. science, God vs. devil--are absent from "Sunfire," although she touches on the theme of altered states of consciousness. All in all, it's a lighthearted story of adventure and romance. Despite the blurb on the back cover of The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (did I mention that the subtitle is inaccurate?), the main characters survive. Those characters--five men on an expedition--banter and joust like Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry, and Captain Good from King Solomon's Mines (1885). I imagine Doc Savage's sidekicks were made from the same mold.

Gertrude Barrows (1883-1948) had come of age before movies as we know them were widely seen. She very likely would have learned storytelling from reading rather than from watching movies. And although pulp magazines were almost as old as she (1), that form had entered a new era after the war with the publication of specialty titles, The Thrill Book (1919), Black Mask (1920), then Weird Tales (1923). Although she wrote her stories in the pulp era, Stevens' style was still a little old-fashioned, even antiquated. In her last two stories, she alluded to characters past their prime at age forty; Gertrude turned forty in 1923, in the same month the last chapter of her last story was published.

No one knows why Gertrude Barrows Bennett stopped publishing stories. It could be that she did not feel equipped for a new era in pulps or in a larger society. (2) That's mere speculation. All we know is that Francis Stevens, who did not invent dark fantasy, wrote twelve stories published in a six-year period (plus one published when she was seventeen); that she may have been the first American woman to have a science fiction story published in an American magazine ("The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," 1904); that she may have been the first American to create a totalitarian ruler as a character (The Heads of Cerberus, 1919) (3); that, with "Friend Island" (1918) at least, she was an early feminist writer of fantasy and science fiction; that she wrote several fine and memorable stories (The Citadel of Fear, The Heads of Cerberus, "Claimed!", and "Serapion" among them); that she was a very popular and widely admired writer (4); and that she may have been the most important woman writer of fantasy between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1759-1797) and C.L. Moore (1911-1987). Something else that comes out in a reading of her stories is that she may have been one of few Christian writers of fantasy and science fiction before C.S. Lewis.

There are some who believe that Francis Stevens influenced A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. (5, 6) I haven't seen any evidence of that, but that's not to say that there isn't any. That belief seems to be just one of those things that people pass around on the Internet. But I'm done with my crusading. I think I have shown that Stevens did not invent or work in the late twentieth century sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. That seems to be hype, or a marketing ploy, or the sound of someone trying to add something to his curriculum vitae. If there is going to be any further investigation into her career, someone else will have to do it.

And so ends this series.

Notes

(1) The first pulp magazine, The Argosy, switched to an all-story pulp format in 1896, in the year of Gertrude Barrows' golden age of twelve.

(2) Although Weird Tales dates from the specialized era of pulp magazines, it seems now like an old-fashioned or antiquated magazine. That makes sense in its way. After all, fantasy and weird fiction are about the past. The founder of the magazine, Jacob Clark Henneberger, was born in 1890, as was his leading author, H.P. Lovecraft. Both cut their teeth on tales by Poe, both came from the Victorian era, and both turned thirty in the year the Roaring Twenties began. For years the main cover artist was C.C. Senf (1873-1949), a decidedly Old-World artist with Old-World sensibilities. It would be many years before the fantasy or science fiction story was well polished--as in the work of Robert A. Heinlein, for instance--and before pulp art came into its own--as with Virgil Finlay or Ed Emshwiller. Those Victorian origins for Weird Tales are one of the reasons why I chose the background for this blog: it reminded me of that old velvety wallpaper you could still see in houses when I was a kid, long after Weird Tales had come to an end.

(3) She was not, however, the first American or American woman to write a dystopian novel. Both honors may fall to Anna Bowman Dodd (1855-1929), author of The Republic of the Future, published in 1887.

(4) Eight of her thirteen stories were cover stories at first publication.
(5) When I read her stories, I was reminded not of Merritt or Lovecraft, but C.L. Moore. I'm not sure how likely it is that Catherine would have read Gertrude's stories. I'm not sure that you could make a case that the latter influenced the former. More likely, they all read the same stuff and each other's stuff, and out of that soup came the fantasy of the 1910s through the 1940s.
(6) As I think about it more, Francis Stevens may have had more in common with Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) than with A. Merritt or H.P. Lovecraft: Both were pseudonymous authors about whom almost nothing is known; both lived, wrote, and died in isolation; both were writers of very colorful and imaginative science fantasy stories; both had a relatively small output of stories that were yet very popular; and both had more than their share of cover stories. Finally, speaking of isolation--from the Latin, "made into an island": five of her thirteen stories take place at least in part on islands. The remainder involve separation from the outside world, either physically or psychologically, perhaps a requirement for fantasy fiction in general.

I have been working on a series categorizing the covers of Weird Tales. I looked and looked at this one and couldn't figure it out. Now I have read "Sunfire" and I still can't figure it out. What the heck is going on here? And why did anyone think this would make a good cover? As the man in the commercial said, the world may never know. (Art by R.M Mally.)

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A. Merritt (1884-1943)-Part One

May 14, 2015, 3:00 am

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Aka W. Fenimore
Author, Journalist, Editor, Poet
Born January 20, 1884, Beverly, New Jersey
Died August 21, 1943, Indian Rocks Beach, Florida

Abraham Grace Merritt was a contemporary of Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--and he was her champion, the man who persuaded the editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels Magazine to begin reprinting her stories in the early 1940s. Born on January 20, 1884, A. Merritt was just four months younger than Gertrude Barrows. His first story in the field of fantasy, "Through the Dragon Glass," was published in the November 24, 1917, issue of All-Story Weekly. Francis Stevens' first story, "The Nightmare," had been published just seven months before in the same magazine, in the issue of April 14, 1917. Like Stevens, Merritt was not an extremely prolific author of fantasy. If I have done my research correctly, then I count his total output as seventeen short stories and serials published from 1917 to 1936. That list is short enough to appear here in its entirety:

"Through the Dragon Glass" (All-Story Weekly, Nov. 24, 1917)
"The People of the Pit" (All-Story Weekly, Jan. 5, 1918)
"The Moon Pool" (All-Story Weekly, June 22, 1918)
"Conquest of the Moon Pool" (six-part serial in All-Story Weekly, Feb. 15-Mar. 22, 1919)
"Three Lines of Old French" (All-Story Weekly, Aug. 9, 1919)
"The Metal Monster" (eight-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, Aug. 7-Sept. 25, 1920)
"The Pool of the Stone God" as by W. Fenimore (American Weekly, Sept. 23, 1923)
"The Ship of Ishtar" (six-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, Nov. 8-Dec. 13, 1924)
"Seven Footprints to Satan" (five-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 2-July 30, 1927)
"The Face in the Abyss" (Argosy All-Story Weekly, Sept. 8, 1923)
"The Woman of the Wood" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1926)
"The Snake Mother" (seven-part serial in Argosy, Oct. 25-Dec. 6, 1930)
"Dwellers in the Mirage" (six-part serial in Argosy, Jan. 23-Feb. 27, 1932)
"Burn, Witch, Burn!" (six-part serial in Argosy, Oct. 22-Nov. 26, 1932)
"The Drone Man" (Fantasy Magazine, Sept. 1934)
"Creep, Shadow!" (seven-part serial in Argosy, Sept. 8-Oct. 20, 1934)
"Rhythm of the Spheres" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Oct. 1936)

All of those stories have been reprinted multiple times, and the serials have been reprinted as whole novels. "The Pool of the Stone God," from American Weekly, was Merritt's only story published under a name not his own. His use of a pseudonym is understandable considering that Merritt was at the time on the staff of American Weekly. In 1937 he became its editor.

In addition, A. Merritt contributed to two round-robin stories:

"Cosmos" (seventeen-part round-robin serial in Science Fiction Digest/Fantasy Magazine, July 1933-Jan. 1935) (1)
"The Challenge from Beyond" (five-part round-robin story in Fantasy Magazine, Sept. 1935)

And he wrote a number of stories, essays, fragments, and outlines that were published after his death or fleshed out by others and, again, published posthumously. These include:

"The Fox Woman," a story completed by Hannes Bok and published in 1946
"The Black Wheel," a story completed by Hannes Bok and published in 1947
"The White Road" and "When Old Gods Awake," two fragments published in The Fox Woman and Other Stories in 1949
"How We Found Circe," an essay reprinted in Weird Tales, Winter 1973

Finally, A. Merritt was the author of many poems and pieces of non-fiction published in science fiction and fantasy magazines over the years. These include three letters to "The Eyrie," October 1929, October 1934, and November 1935. I should warn you that if you begin looking into Merritt's writing credits, you could easily lose your way. If I have left out any stories or have made any mistakes, I hope someone will offer corrections.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Merritt's chapter of "Cosmos,""The Last Poet and the Robots" (Part 11, Apr. 1934), was, according to a quote from Mike Ashley on Wikipedia, "voted the most popular [and] a gem of a story."

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A. Merritt (1884-1943)-Part Two

May 15, 2015, 3:00 am

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So the careers of A. Merritt and Francis Stevens have some similarities and possibly some connections. The two authors may have met early in their careers, when she was working as a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania and he was a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Sunday Supplement and/or The Sunday American Magazine, forerunner to The American Weekly. (1) Both had their first stories published in All-Story Weekly in 1917, and both wrote almost exclusively for the Munsey magazines (Argosy and All-Story) for several years. There was even a time when readers thought that "Francis Stevens" was a pseudonym of A. Merritt. They were only half right, for "Francis Stevens" was actually the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. One difference between Merritt and Stevens is that he became well known and very wealthy. She was neither.

It's reasonable to assume that Merritt was in contact with Gertrude Barrows Bennett. His first story in Famous Fantastic Mysteries or Fantastic Novels Magazine--two titles that reprinted stories from the old Munsey magazines--was "The Moon Pool," the lead story in the first issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, dated September-October 1939. Stevens' first story reprinted in those magazines was "Behind the Curtain" in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for January 1940. I have lost track of the source that says Merritt persuaded Mary Gnaedinger, the editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels Magazine, to reprint Francis Stevens' stories. I wonder now if he let Gertrude Barrows Bennett know about these new markets for her stories or if he secured payment for her for their reprinting. In any case, A. Merritt died of a heart attack on August 21, 1943, at his winter home in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. Gertrude Barrows Bennett followed him to the grave in 1948. Nonetheless, Mary Gnaedinger continued reprinting their work. Six of Gertrude's thirteen stories were reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels Magazine, or Famous Fantastic Mysteries Combined with Fantastic Novels Magazine from 1940 to 1950. At least thirteen of Merritt's stories were so honored. His were also reprinted in Amazing Stories, Avon Fantasy Reader, Fantastic, Leaves, Satellite Science Fiction, Science and Invention, Science Fiction Digest, and Super Science and Fantastic Stories, as well as many collections and anthologies over the years.

Both A. Merritt and Francis Stevens had just one story published in Weird Tales, both in the 1920s. Merritt's contribution, "The Woman of the Wood" (Aug. 1926), was voted by readers the most popular story in the issue in which it appeared, for the entire year of 1926, and of all stories published from 1924 to 1940. It was reprinted in January 1934 and was again voted the most popular story in that issue. (2) Stevens' lone contribution, "Sunfire" (July-Sept. 1923) was published before readers were polled for their favorite stories. With it, her writing career came to an end, while Merritt's continued to the end of his life, although his last story published in his lifetime was in 1936, shortly before he became editor of The American Weekly in 1937 (3).

As further evidence of Merritt's popularity, in 1938, Argosy polled its readers for their favorite story in the fifty-eight-year history of the magazine. The winner was "The Ship of Ishtar" from 1924. Argosy proceeded to reprint Merritt's story and confessed that it had paid him the highest word-rate of any its authors. The editor wrote: "This only proves he was worth it!" (4) More than a decade later, in December 1949, Merritt had a magazine published with his name in the title, A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine. Mary Gnaedinger was the editor for five issues dated December 1949 to October 1950, when the magazine came to an end. Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine (1954) and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (1977-present) later fell into the category of magazines named for authors.

A. Merritt was and is a very popular writer, and his stories have seldom if ever been out of print. According to Sam Moskowitz, Avon Publications estimated that its reprintings of Merritt's stories had sold four million copies as of 1959. (5) Merritt's stories have been reprinted many times in many languages, including English, of course, as well as French, Italian, and German. They have also been adapted to the movies in Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) and two adaptations of "Burn, Witch, Burn!", The Devil Doll (1936) and Muñecos infernales (1961). He is supposed to have been an influence on Francis Stevens and H.P. Lovecraft, or they were an influence on him, or each other, or some combination of influences, one upon another, for which no one seems to have offered very much evidence. (6) Suffice it to say, Merritt's stories "are among the most famous titles in the canon of fantastic literature." (7) A. Merritt was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999.

A. Merritt's Story and Essay in Weird Tales

"The Moon Pool" (Aug. 1926; reprinted Jan. 1934)

"How We Found Circe" (Winter 1973; originally in The Story Behind the Story, 1942)

A. Merritt's Letters to "The Eyrie"

Oct. 1929

Oct. 1934

Nov. 1935

Further Reading

There is much to read about A. Merritt on the Internet and in those ancient artifacts known as books, including:

"The Marvelous A. Merritt" in Explorers of the Infinite by Sam Moskowitz (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 189-207.
Introduction by Sam Moskowitz to "The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt in Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance " in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 137-138.
A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool by Sam Moskowitz (1985)

Notes

(1) Gertrude Barrows Bennett had arrived in Philadelphia in 1909 or 1910, either newly married or newly widowed. A. Merritt left Philadelphia in 1912 for New York City, but I can't say that he cut ties to his former city. It's worth noting that one of the characters in Stevens' story "Sunfire" (1923) is a "war-correspondent and a writer of magazine tales." Named Alcot Waring, he is described as a "vast mountain of flesh . . . obese, freckle-faced, with small, round, very bright and clear gray eyes" (The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, p. 348). I have seen two photographs of Merritt but have never read a description of him. He doesn't appear to have been a small man, but he may not have been Alcot Waring-sized either. Like Waring, Merritt spent some time in Latin America, at least as a visitor and maybe as an explorer.
(2) Merritt also had an essay in the magazine, "How We Found Circe," in a later incarnation, Winter 1973.
(3) At the time, The American Weekly, the Sunday magazine of the Hearst newspaper chain, claimed "the largest circulation of any periodical in the world" according to Sam Moskowitz. (Source: Moskowitz's introduction to "How We Found Circe" in Weird Tales, Winter 1973, p. 26.) Considering his new responsibilities, we can't blame Merritt for not writing in the field of fantasy after 1937.

(4) Quoted in "The Marvelous A. Merritt" by Sam Moskowitz in Explorers of the Infinite (1963), p. 190.
(5) Explorers of the Infinite, p. 206.
(6) In "The Moon Pool" by Merritt (published June 22, 1918), there is a "moon-door." In The Heads of Cerberus by Stevens (published August-October 1919), there is a "moon-gate." If these things are evidence of influence, one upon another, then Merritt would seem the influence in this case. But how far does anyone want to go with something like that?

(7) Sam Moskowitz in his introduction to "The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt in Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance " in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (1970), p. 137.

Abraham Merritt (1884-1943)

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-Through the Dragon Glass

May 16, 2015, 3:00 am

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"Through the Dragon Glass" by A. Merritt in

All-Story Weekly, November 24, 1917

Abraham Merritt was a thirty-three-year-old journalist laboring away in New York City when All-Story Weekly published his first story, an Oriental fantasy called "Through the Dragon Glass." It's no surprise that his was not the cover story. Instead, a long-established author, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, earned his place on the cover with "The Cosmic Courtship." Merritt's story was also a romance, though not "inter-planetary." Inter-dimensional might be the right word to describe it, as the "Dragon Glass, " an artifact looted from the Forbidden City at the end of the Boxer Rebellion, allows its possessor to pass from one plane into another. The uncanny qualities of the Dragon Glass make me think of the green casket in "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens, from 1920. The story also mentions Iram, the many-columned city of the desert that showed up as Irem in "The Nameless City" by H.P. Lovecraft (1921). The artist is unknown. The medium looks like watercolor or gouache. The technique, especially in the handling of the female figure, reminds me of the work of Roy G. Krenkel (1918-1983) or some other American illustrator of the 1950s and '60s.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The People of the Pit

May 18, 2015, 3:00 am

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"The People of the Pit" by A. Merritt in
All-Story Weekly, January 5, 1918

A. Merritt's second published story, "The People of the Pit," appeared in All-Story Weekly for January 5, 1918. The cover story was the first chapter of a serial called "Trapped" by Ben Ames Williams. The cover artist is unknown. "The People of the Pit" is a tale of the Far North, written when there were still recent memories of the Yukon Gold Rush. It's also a kind of Lost Worlds story and a story of a subterranean city, like earlier stories of the Vril-Ya and later stories of the Deros. There are also similarities in H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness to "The People of the Pit." With his second story, A. Merritt was poised for his first great success.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The Moon Pool

May 20, 2015, 3:00 am

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"The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt in
All-Story Weekly, June 22, 1918

"The Moon Pool" was A. Merritt's third published story and the tale that won him his fame. Like Merrit's previous stories, "The Moon Pool" is a romance of other worlds accessible from our own through some kind of extraordinary passageway. In Merritt's tale, the moon provides the passageway. His stories must have been a great influence on other writers, H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, Edmund Hamilton, and probably Nictzin Dyalhis among them. Raymond A. Palmer, who fashioned "The Shaver Mystery" from the scientific romances he read in his youth, also fell under Merritt's spell. Sam Moskowitz, in his book Explorers of the Infinite (1963), recounted how, after the publication of "The Moon Pool,""letters by the hundreds began to pour across the desk of Robert H. Davis, the Munsey editor who had discovered Merritt." Davis had paid Merritt $50 for "The Moon Pool." He offered forty times that for a sequel.

In 1939, the Frank A. Munsey Company began reprinting works from its old story magazines, Argosy and All-Story Weekly. The lead story in the first issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, dated September-October 1939, was none other than "The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt. Mary Gnaedinger was editor.

Editor Alden Norton made use of "The Moon Pool" in the Canadian pulp Super Science and Fantastic Stories for December 1945. The format appears to have been the same: old stories reprinted for a new generation. The cover illustration was recycled as well. It had previously appeared on the cover of the September 1945 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, presumably illustrating "Phra the Phoenician" by Edwin Lester Arnold. The art was by Lawrence Sterne Stevens (1886-1960).

Mary Gnaedinger also edited Fantastic Novels Magazine, a companion to Famous Fantastic Mysteries. In the May issue of 1948, she reprinted "The Moon Pool" once again, and the cover artist was once again Stevens, who went by the name Lawrence.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The Conquest of the Moon Pool

May 22, 2015, 3:00 am

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"The Conquest of the Moon Pool" by A. Merritt in

All-Story Weekly, February 15, 1919

Eight months after publishing "The Moon Pool,"All-Story Weekly came out with "The Conquest of the Moon Pool," described on the cover as "An Amazing Sequel to an Unparalleled Adventure." It was Merritt's fourth published story and his first to be serialized. For the next six weeks, readers thrilled to the adventures of Merritt's heroes in a world found underground and beyond the ken of ordinary existence. "The reaction that followed the last of the six weekly installments," wrote Sam Moskowitz, "verged on hysteria." (1) Before the year was out, G.P. Putnam's Sons issued a hardbound edition of the saga, combining "The Moon Pool" with "The Conquest of the Moon Pool." In the ninety-five years since, the two stories have more often been reprinted in their combined form than individually.

"The Moon Pool"--I believe in the combined version--was serialized for the first time in Amazing Stories from May to July 1927. Merritt's name landed on the cover below that of H.G. Wells, but the illustration seems to be unrelated to his or their stories. The artist was Hugo Gernsback's mainstay, Frank R. Paul. Gernsback was of course a pioneer in radio. It's no surprise that radio equipment would figure so prominently on the cover. I'm not sure what the narrative is here. It could be that the woman is saying, "Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope." Or this could be the male fantasy projected by Gernsback or by science fiction in general, namely: Through science, you will get a woman. It's as true now as it was then, only now the woman is--though still miniature--two-dimensional and digital vs. three-dimensional and presumably real.

The original story "The Moon Pool" appeared in the first issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries in September-October 1939. "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" followed over the next six issues, from November 1939 to April 1940.

The March 1940 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries was the first with a pictorial cover. Virgil Finlay created the cover art. The April issue, in which the last installment of "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" appeared, had an uncharacteristic cover from Frank R. Paul. It seems to me that the publishers of pulp magazines had noticed the vast popularity of comic books and printed this and other covers in response.

Finally, "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" was reprinted in its entirety in Fantastic Novels Magazine in September 1948. The controversy over "The Shaver Mystery" had raged over the previous few years among readers of science fiction. It's likely that Raymond A. Palmer, in formulating the Shaver Mystery, drew some of his ideas from the scientific romances of the early 1900s, including "The Moon Pool" saga. The companion title to Fantastic Novels Magazine was of course Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Many fantasy and science fiction stories are essentially mysteries, "The Call of Cthulhu" for example. Even early superheroes were called "mystery men." So is it any wonder that Ray Palmer would call his new mythology of subterranean races of robots a mystery? That would have been a powerful attraction to readers. Unfortunately, the Shaver Mystery didn't pan out for Palmer and his sidekick, Richard Shaver. On the other hand, Palmer latched on to an even more powerful myth in the 1947 with the coming of the flying saucers.

The Woman of the Moon Pool

There are images from science fiction that stick in the head of every fan. This one--by the artist Lawrence--sticks. To me it represents a long-ago and utterly lost era in American culture, especially in art and science fiction. The draftsmanship and technique are flawless. They are the work of a master craftsman. The foreshortening of the arm, the handling of flesh and underlying bone, the shading, the positioning and rendering of the fingers--all are perfect. That takes nothing away from the figure as a whole or its accoutrements, which are beautifully and impeccably done. In our current age when everything is becoming miniaturized, weapons in science fiction and comic books have become ridiculously huge (as have breasts and biceps). The artists and designers of today could learn a thing or two in the economy of Lawrence's little derringer-like blaster.

The woman is of course beyond glamorous. She reminds me of those sweater girls from postwar Hollywood movies--Virginia Mayo, Janet Leigh, Ava Gardner. Not that she is an object, for the woman in Lawrence's painting is strong and determined. She represented a certain ideal of her time, I'm sure. Women like her worked in factories and flew airplanes during the war. The men who fought, fought in part for her and to return to her. Together they defeated tyrants and built the most prosperous society the world has ever known.

My feeling of nostalgia goes beyond the artist's ability or the woman's looks or femininity or strength. A pulp magazine is a magazine full of stories and art, but it's also an artifact of a previous era. (I have read a quote that magazines are the closest thing to a time machine we have.) In the 1940s, the future as represented in science fiction was going to be great. Having survived the onslaught of totalitarianism (a kind of science-fictional system of belief), Americans looked with confidence (though also with some anxiety) to the future. A cover of a science fiction magazine like this one is a kind of symbol of those prevailing feelings and of the era in which it was published. A movie from that time is called The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), an ironic title to be sure, but also true and un-ironic in its way. (The line is spoken by Virginia Mayo's character.) A history of the same period is called The Best Years: 1945-1950 by Joseph C. Goulden (1976). The titles are not boastful or prideful. There's more than a sneaking suspicion that they are true.

Now we have arrived in the future--an alternate future--in which we have stopped ourselves dead in our tracks. Science fiction, being essentially optimistic, is no longer our genre of choice. Fantasy, including the darkest kinds of fantasy, has taken its place. Instead of being an expression of her own life and character, a beautiful woman--so called--is now a concoction of Botox, collagen, silicone, artificial tan, and a plastic surgeon's skill with knife and suction tube. Depictions of beautiful women today are seen as symbols of patriarchy, oppression, sexism, and injustice. Men and women both seem to prefer ugliness to beauty. I won't linger over that. The ills of our society go far deeper. Instead I wonder, did the men and women of the 1940s fight and die and build and bring children into the world so that we could give up hope and the freedom they won, so that we could collapse in on ourselves and wallow in our most miserable self-indulgent and self-absorbed misery? I wonder, too, does it make any sense to feel a sense of nostalgia for a time of hope and optimism, in other words, to look backward to a time of looking forward, to remember so fondly a previous civilization that fought for freedom and was filled with hope but that, for all practical purposes and mostly by our own actions, now lies in ruins at our feet?

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The Complete Moon Pool

May 24, 2015, 3:00 am

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"The Moon Pool" (1918) and its sequel, "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" (1919), were extraordinarily popular. It was only a matter of time before they were reprinted in book form, and it was a pretty brief time at that. I don't know the exact date of publication, but The Moon Pool, combining the two magazine stories, came out in 1919. The author, A. Merritt, revised and updated his stories for the book. For example, in keeping up with the times, the nefarious German from the original version became a nefarious Russian. I believe this is the original dust jacket. The artist was Joseph Clement Coll (1881-1921).

It's hard to follow the publication history of "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool." The two were first published separately, then revised and combined into a novel-length story, also called The Moon Pool. I believe all the editions you see here are of the combined version. This was the second, from 1929, published by Horace Liveright with a jacket illustration by Lee Conrey (1883-1976), who also did illustrations for The American Weekly, the same Sunday supplement on which A. Merritt worked for many years.

Here is what must have been the first softbound edition, a digest-sized book and number 18 in the Avon Murder Mystery Monthly series, from 1944. The art is unsigned and the artist is unknown.

The 1951 edition, an Avon mass-market paperback, has that classic 1940s/1950s science fiction look to it. Unfortunately, the artist is unknown.

The 1956 edition, also from Avon, is a step down in my opinion. Not that Art Sussman (1927-2008) created a bad cover, it's just that something was lost when science fiction tried to become serious or relevant in the 1950s.

The 1962 edition from Collier Books is far more subdued. It almost looks like a book in the social sciences. The cover design was by Ben Feder, Inc., a firm run by none other than Ben Feder (1923-2009), an artist, real estate developer, and winemaker.

In 1968, Collier Books issued an edition with a more science-fiction-like cover by Don Ivan Punschatz (1936-2009). I would buy a book like this, even if I had never heard of the story or the author.

You didn't have to tell me that the cover artist on Avon's 1978 edition is British. It just has that look. His name is Rodney Matthews, he was born in 1945 in North Somerset, and he is still at work.

Everybody likes A. Merritt, including the French. In 1957, the publisher Hachette came out with Le Gouffre de la Lune, number 48 in its series Le Rayon Fantastique. The cover artist is unknown.

The artist on the 1975 edition from J'ai Lu was Philippe Caza (b. 1941).

Rowena Morrill (b. 1944) was on hand for the 1986 edition.

Here's a German edition from 1981 entitled Der Mondsee. I don't know the name of the cover artist.

Finally, an Italian-language version, Il Pozzo della Luna, from 1998, again by an unknown cover artist.

I would like to acknowledge The Internet Speculative Fiction Database in the writing of this series.
Captions copyright 2015 Terence E. Hanley

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The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd-Part One

May 26, 2015, 3:00 am

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Awhile back, in writing about Francis Stevens, I mentioned a book called The Republic of the Future (1887) by Anna Bowman Dodd, an early dystopian novel and maybe the first by an American woman or by any woman anywhere. There isn't much about Anna Bowman Dodd on the Internet. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the online resources that I have used in the past in researching and writing about writers and artists. I'll just have to go with what I have found.

Anna Bowman Blake was born on January 21, 1858, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a merchant. In 1883, she married Edward Williams Dodd (1848-1909), a Bostonian and a direct descendant of John Hancock. Like his father-in-law, Dodd was a merchant. He was also a clubman, and according to the New York Times (Oct. 1, 1909), the Dodds' home on Madison Avenue in New York "was the rendezvous for all that was most distinguished in the social world, in art, and in literature." In later years he and his wife lived in France. Dodd was in failing health for some time towards the end of his life. He died at his home, Le Manoir de Vasouy, in Honfleur, Calvados, Normandy, in 1909. His widow survived him by two decades, dying in Paris on January 29, 1929.

Described by the Encyclopedia Americana as "a voluminous writer for the magazines from her youth," Anna Bowman Dodd authored many books, most of which are travel books, including Cathedral Days: A Tour in Southern England (1887), Glorinda, A Story (novel, 1888), On the Broads (illustrated by Joseph Pennell, 1896), Castilian Days (1899), Falaise, the Town of the Conqueror (1900), In the Palaces of the Sultan (non-fiction, 1903), On the Knees of the Gods (novel, 1908), Heroic France (1915), Up the Seine to the Battlefields (1920), In and Out of Three Normandy Inns (1924), Tallyrand, the Training of a Statesman, 1754-1838 (1927), The Struthers, and An American Husband in Paris. She also wrote for The London Art Journal. The Republic of the Future, or Socialism, A Reality, from 1887, was her first book or one of her first. Though satirical, it is also a serious foretelling of a future society into which we seemed to have arrived, at least in part.

You would think that a long-forgotten writer would remain forgotten. Instead, Anna Bowman Dodd was recently (in relative terms) the subject of an article called "An 1887 Science Fiction Novel Predicted DeBlasio and Bloomberg’s New York" by Daniel Greenfield (Feb. 15, 2014). When it comes to predictions, I'm with Yogi Berra who said (perhaps apocryphally), "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Science fiction writers aren't very good at making predictions, but we should realize that science fiction isn't about prediction. Instead, the idea is to extrapolate into the future, or into an alternate past or present, what we already know about ourselves and the world in which we live. That's where the predictive power comes from, and that was what Anna Bowman Dodd was able to do, to a really startling degree, in 1887. I should point out that Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was published the same year as The Republic of the Future, although I don't know which came out first. The fashion in academia and the penumbrae of academia is to call a work like Anna's "reactionary" or "an attack" on socialism or progressivism. I would say that once an effective observer pokes holes into a gasbag of an idea, that idea can never really get off the ground. That's what Anna Bowman Dodd did with socialism, and in fewer than one hundred pages.

Next: Quotes from The Republic of the Future.

"The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people." (p. 58)

"They have the look of people who have come to the end of things and have failed to find it amusing." (p. 23)

The other day, I closed with a painting from the 1940s, Lawrence's cover for Famous Fantastic Novels from September 1948. Here is a painting from that same era, "The Subway" by George Tooker (1920-2011), from 1950. The people in the picture don't seem to me to be melancholic so much as filled with anxiety and despair. Also, they aren't living in a socialist society. Nonetheless, there is a feeling of dystopian conformity and of being caged without the possibility of escape. The painting could easily be a work of fantasy or science fiction, but maybe of a later period, for it is in strong contrast with the exuberant images of science fiction of its time.

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The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd-Part Two

May 28, 2015, 3:00 am

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The Republic of the Future was first published in 1887. I have read it in an edition in which the author is uncredited (Rahway, N.J.: W.L. Mershon & Co., 1887). It's a short book, only eighty-six pages in all. Each of the seven chapters takes the form of a letter from a Swedish nobleman named Wolfgang to his friend Hannevig back home.

The weakness in a utopian or dystopian novel is always that the author is so busy describing her perfect (or perfectly awful) society that she doesn't have time to tell a story. That's true of The Republic of the Future as well. The point isn't really to tell a story, though. Anna Bowman Dodd's point was that socialism is a recipe for misery, something we all ought to know by now but that we must seemingly learn anew with every generation.

Wolfgang the nobleman travels from Sweden, where people are free, to New York Socialistic City by way of an undersea tunnel. His first letter is dated December 1, 2050. He describes what he sees to Hannevig in epistolary form:

To connect the word enjoyment with the aspect of these serious socialists is almost laughable. A more sober collection of people I never beheld. They are as solemn as the oldest and wisest of owls. They have the look of people who have come to the end of things and who have failed to find it amusing. The entire population appear to be eternally in the streets . . . on the lookout for something that never happens. What indeed, is there to happen? Have they not come to the consummation of everything, of their dreams and their hopes and desires? A man can't have his dream and dream it too. (pp. 22-23)

One of the residents of New York explains to Wolfgang: "The State scientists now regulate all such matters [regarding eating]. Once a month our Officer of Hygiene comes and examines each member of the household. He then prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require for the next few weeks," after which prescription every person orders his or her food to be delivered by tube. (pp. 28-29)

Some of the women are still pretty, in spite of their hideous clothes. But they all tell me, they wouldn't be [pretty] if they could help it, as they hold that the beauty of their sex was the chief cause of their long-continued former slavery; they consider comeliness now as a brand and mark of which to be ashamed. . . . I should say that the prettiness which has descended to some of the women fails to awaken any old-time sentiment or gallantry on the part of the men. There has, I learn, been a gradual decay of the erotic sentiment, which doubtless accounts for the indifference among the men. . . . (pp. 36-37)

The few men . . . whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less an exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. (p. 38)

A law was passed providing that children almost immediately after birth, should be brought up, educated and trained under state direction. . . . It has followed, of course, that with the jurisdiction of the state over the children of the community, all family life has died out. (pp. 39-40)

Break away from his past as hard as ever he may try, [the American] has still found himself heir to his past, and his heredity dominates him in spite of all his attempts to throw it off. (p. 46)

Well, if some of the ineradicable, indestructible principles in human nature could be changed as easily as laws are made or unmade, the chances for an ideal realization of the happiness of mankind would be the more easily attained. But the Socialists committed the grave error of omitting to count some of these determining laws into the sum of their calculations. (p. 56)

The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people. The men, particularly, seem sunk in a torpor of dejection and settled apathy. (p. 58)

The race having been leveled to a common plane, there has been a gradual dying out of individuality. (p. 60)

. . . the entire population seems to have but one serious purpose in life--to murder time which appears to be slowly killing them. (p. 63)

All scholars, authors, artists and scientists who were found on examination to be more gifted than the average, were exiled. A strict law was passed . . . forbidding mental or artistic development being carried beyond a certain fixed standard, a standard attainable by all. (p. 66)

It is the State that directs all such ventures [involving trade and commerce]. But the State, for some reason or other, does not appear to be a success as a merchant or as a commercial financier. (p. 71)

The law of equality, with its logical decrees for the suppression of superiority, has brought about the other extreme, sterility. The crippling of individual activity has finally produced its legitimate result--it has fatally sapped the energies of the people. (p. 73)

. . . if men are to be made equal, such equality can only be maintained by the suppression of degrees of inequality. (p. 74)

An account from a history read by Wolfgang: ". . . for years the state penitentiaries were filled with men whose crime was their unconquerable desire selfishly to surpass their less fortunate brothers." (p. 75)

Wolfgang gives his assessment of socialist New York to one of the residents: "In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. . . . Ennui is the curse of the land." (p. 84)

I have quoted at such length for a reason, for I think that these quotes and the book as a whole fairly describe our time, or as well as any bit of fiction from 1887 might. Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Last Man from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (published 1883-1891) sounds like Anna's socialist American. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., returned to the theme in 1961 with his short story, "Harrison Bergeron," which begins:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.

That equality is enforced by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, who I imagine looks like Kathleen Sibelius. The title character is taken away from his family because of his superior physical and intellectual abilities. His father, also superior, has a "mental handicap radio in his ear." Every twenty seconds it goes off, thereby scrambling his thoughts and making him incapable of dissent. Harrison attempts a revolution, but . . . well, you just have to read the story. In fact you should read the story.

* * *

It's interesting to me that Anna Bowman Dodd, who was more remote from our time than was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., set her story in 2050 vs. his setting of 2081. Interesting in that she was more accurate in her prediction than he was. And before you say, "Aw, come on, that's not going to happen," consider the exact words of Adam Swift, a so-called philosopher of this very moment:

One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.

And on the issue of loving parents who read to their children, thereby bestowing upon them an advantage in life, Mr. Swift has this to say:

I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.

Oh, thank you, Mr. Swift, most high and exalted thinker, for this very special dispensation of allowing us to continue to read to our children.

* * *

Adam Swift's opinions remind me of a work written by another man named Swift. It was only a modest proposal when that Mr. Swift suggested that poverty and starvation in Ireland might be cured by eating children. Anyway, if you want to read about Adam Swift and his ideas, you can start with an article called "Is Having a Loving Family an Unfair Advantage?" by Joe Gelonesi, dated May 1, 2015, here. As for the question of happiness under a socialist regime, you might want to read "The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness" by Michael Booth, dated January 30, 2015, here. A quote from that article from newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen of Berlingske:

It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.

Here's another from Niels Lillelund of Jyllands-Posten:

In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.

I don't know why they're complaining. These people live in a perfect society, one for which we should all be striving, one that we will have once we have laid waste to the past and have progressed into the future. In fact you might even call it the Republic of the Future.

* * *

You can fairly say that I have cherry-picked from The Republic of the Future the quotes that best describe our current state of affairs. The book includes many predictions that have not come true or that are inaccurate. You might also say that the author, Anna Bowman Dodd, had a conflict of interest. After all, her father and husband were both merchants. Of course she would point out the flaws of a system that threatened her values and her way of life. That's what privileged people do. I would answer: Yes, Anna's father and husband were merchants, but people don't oppose socialism because it threatens to upset the apple cart of the current economy. They oppose it because socialism threatens human freedom and the human spirit. And I would ask: How is economic freedom not freedom? Should we be content to give up our freedom of speech if all other freedoms are allowed to remain intact? How does that make any sense? I would say instead that a threat to any of our freedoms is a threat to all of our freedoms. Anna Bowman Dodd and people like her have pointed these things out. And the people who today threaten those same freedoms don't like it. And that's why we hear all the name-calling and the whining about "attacks" on socialism.

* * *

I'm still on the lookout for the first totalitarian in literature. The Republic of the Future doesn't provide him. But it does provide a prescient view of a future society, a society painfully like our own, and a warning that has gone unheeded by countless millions of people in this land of the free and home of the brave.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for October of 1961. The cover is by the great Chesley Bonestell. The dream of science fiction was that this would be our future. "Harrison Bergeron," which first appeared in this issue, now seems closer to the truth.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-Three Lines of Old French

May 31, 2015, 3:00 am

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"Three Lines of Old French" by A. Merritt in

All-Story Weekly, August 9, 1919

"Three Lines of Old French" is another of A. Merritt's fantasies about crossing over or passing through boundaries. It is an unusual story in that it is set in France during the Great War, which had ended not even a year before the story was published. I don't know of very many tales of fantasy, science fiction, or weird fiction that are set during the war and on the front lines. Maybe the war was too horrible to treat it in what many would consider non-serious genres of fiction. The cover story is "The Curse of Capistrano" by Johnson McCully. The cover art is unsigned and the artist is unknown.

"Three Lines of Old French" is too short for publication as a novel. Nonetheless, it took up all of one volume in a short-lived series called Bizarre. This is the cover of Bizarre #1 from 1937.

The story was reprinted again in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for May-June 1940. The artist was Frank R. Paul.

The interior art was by Virgil Finlay. You might remember this image from my article called "Weird Tales and World War I" dated November 11, 2011, here.

In Observance of Memorial Day.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The Metal Monster

June 1, 2015, 3:00 am

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"The Metal Monster" by A. Merritt in
Argosy All-Story Weekly,
August 7-September 25, 1920

In 1920, Argosy merged with All-Story Weekly to become Argosy All-Story Weekly. "The Metal Monster," an eight-part serial, was A. Merritt's first cover story for the newly-named magazine and his second overall. The cover artist, Glen White, was the first to depict the blonde Norhala and the geometric forms of her domain.

"The Metal Monster" was serialized a second time in a Gernsback magazine, Science and Invention, from October 1927 to August 1928. (There were eleven parts in all.) The story was revised somewhat and retitled "The Metal Emperor." Unfortunately, I don't have any images from that first reprinting. Instead, here is the cover for Famous Fantastic Mysteries Combined with Fantastic Novels Magazine, August 1941, which included the complete story under its original title. The artist was Virgil Finlay. This is the first of four covers showing Norhala with her arms raised.

Avon Murder Mystery Monthly reprinted the story as a complete book in 1945. This was #41 in the series. The cover was by Paul Stahr (1883-1953), who had originally illustrated stories for Argosy All-Story Weekly. According to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, this was Stahr's last published work of fantasy or science fiction.

Avon reprinted The Metal Monster again in 1951 with a cover by an unknown artist . . .

And a third time in 1957. The illustrator was Richard Powers (1921-1996).

A French publisher, Hachette, also issued an edition in 1957. The title is Le Monstre de Métal, and it was #50 in the series Le Rayon Fantastique. The artist is unknown.

Doug Rosa (1932-1976) created the cover illustration for the 1966 Avon edition . . .

Which was reused in the 1972 edition.

In the early 1970s, Hyperion Press put out a series called Classics of Science Fiction with a logo that looks like it came out of ancient Greece. The Metal Monster, from 1974, was one entry in the series.

Finally, Avon once again reissued the book in 1976 with a new cover illustration by Stephen Fabian (b. 1930).

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Ida M. Kier (1879-1963)

June 2, 2015, 3:00 am

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Author, Poet
Born July 1, 1879, Marshall County, Indiana
Died June 13, 1963, King City, Missouri

Ida Mae (or May) Bosworth was born on July 1, 1879, in Marshall County, Indiana, to Parmenus Bosworth and his second wife, Arrilla E. Pittsenbarger Allen Bosworth. In about 1888, Mr. Bosworth took his family to King City, Gentry County, Missouri, by covered wagon. According to a contributor called NMF on the website Find A Grave, he returned with his son to Marshall County, leaving his wife and daughters behind. King City was a fairly young city even then. It had been settled in 1856 by John Pittsenbarger. I assume that Armilla E. Pittsenbarger Allen Bosworth and John Pittsenbarger were related somehow, and that's how Ida Mae Bosworth became a Missourian.

Ida M. Bosworth married John Walker Young Kier (1867-1944), probably around the turn of the century or shortly thereafter. They had at least three children, Thelma, Dale, and Dwight. The Kier family lived in Missouri during the early part of the twentieth century. In 1940, Ida was enumerated in Hastings, Nebraska, with her daughter Thelma.

Arrilla Bosworth died on June 4, 1917. Not long afterward, her daughter, Ida M. Kier, sold her first story, "Gift of the Lightning," to The People's Home Journal. The story was also syndicated in national newspapers. Over the next decade or so, Ida wrote for other magazines, including Blue Moon, Comfort, Cupid's Diary, Holland's, The Home Friend, Love Romances, Love Story Magazine, Table Talk, Telling Tales, Youth's Companion, and a number of Sunday school papers such as Christian Herald and New-Church Messenger. Her poem, "My Mottoes," proved very popular and was reprinted in several magazines, including The Bridgeman's Magazine, Railroad Telegrapher, and Machinist's Monthly Journal. It begins with mention of the poet's mother.

In 1921, Ida wrote something about herself and how she composed her stories in an article called "Contemporary Writers and Their Work: A Series of Autobiographical Letters." (In The Editor, Mar. 18, 1921, pp. 25-27, accessible by clicking here.) "I prefer to write," she explained, "and believe I can do my best work, on dreary days or wild stormy nights." Dreary days and stormy nights may have suited her moods. Moreover, they may have symbolized in some way the events of her life and career, the latter of which began at about the time her mother died and nearly came to an end ten years later when a horrible tragedy befell her family.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that American literature is not easily separable from Gothicism. That literature of course has grown out of the American experience and since colonial days has often elided into fantasy and weird fiction. A Gothic kind of violence entered the life of Ida M. Kier on November 11, 1927, when her half-brother, Henry Peter Allen, murdered his wife and son before killing himself. I wonder if her encounter with madness and violence had any bearing on Ida's writing. Whatever its effect, two of Ida's last published works (according to The FictionMags Index) came in January 1928, just two months after the murders. The last (or presumably the last), her short story "Together" for Weird Tales, was published more than seven years later, in June 1935.

Ida M. Kier died on June 13, 1963, in King City, Missouri, at age eighty-three. She was buried in King City Cemetery.

Ida M. Kier's Story in Weird Tales

"Together" (June 1935)

Further Reading

None known.

Cupid's Diary for February 10, 1926 (No. 81), the last issue before St. Valentine's Day that year. Ida M. Kier's novel, Romance Comes to the Wilderness, appeared in this issue. The cover is beautifully done. Unfortunately we don't know the name of the artist.

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A. Merritt Art Gallery-The Pool of the Stone God

June 3, 2015, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Walter G. Detrick (1884-1926)

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"The Pool of the Stone God" by A. Merritt

(as by W. Fenimore) in

The American Weekly, Sept. 23, 1923

From 1912 until his death in 1943, Abraham Merritt was on the staff of The American Weekly, a Sunday magazine inserted into the newspapers of the Hearst chain. In 1923, Merritt's story "The Pool of the Stone God" was published in The American Weekly. It might have been unseemly for a staff member to have his story published under his own name, thus Merritt used a pseudonym, W. Fenimore. At least I think that's the reason. A source on the Internet says (without attribution or citation) that the name is derived from James Fenimore Cooper from whom Merritt was supposedly descended.

"The Pool of the Stone God" is a very brief story designed for quick reading on a Sunday afternoon. According to Sam Moskowitz, the story is not definitely Merritt's. After reading through issue after issue of The American Weekly, the bibliographer George Wetzel (1921-1983) came to the conclusion that it was indeed the work of Abraham Merritt, and everyone after him seems to have accepted that. See Moskowitz's introduction to the story in Horrors Unknown (1972) for more on that topic.

I don't have an image for the issue in which "The Pool of the Stone God" appeared, September 23, 1923. Instead, here is an issue from two months later, November 25, 1923. This image doesn't really give you an idea of the scale of the thing, but The American Weekly was large, approximately 15 by 21 inches or about tabloid-size. The cover artist was C.D. Mitchell. You can see more covers at the following URL:

http://www.bpib.com/illustra2/various2.htm

and on a very good blog called Stripper's Guide, conducted by the comic strip historian Allan Holtz.

"The Pool of the Stone God" was reprinted in Horrors Unknown, an anthology edited by Sam Moskowitz and published in three editions in the early 1970s. According to The FictionMags Index, it was also reprinted in this issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, dated February 1988. I don't know the name of the cover artist.

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Walter G. Detrick (1884-1926)

June 4, 2015, 3:00 am

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Author, Teacher

Born September 20, 1884, Clarion County, Pennsylvania

Died April 17, 1926, Clarion Township, Clarion County, Pennsylvania

You start with the name of an author. Then in your research you find someone of that same name but without any apparent connection to the author, the subject of your research. Then the problem becomes this: Are they the same person? If you say yes, you risk making a blunder. If you say no, you're back where you started with an unknown author. So you say yes, but . . .

There is only one Walter G. Detrick in the United States census. I can only assume that he was the writer for Weird Tales and that he died tragically young. Son of a blacksmith, Walter Guy Detrick was born on September 20, 1884, in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. In September 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Detrick was a tuberculosis patient at the Hamburg State Sanatorium in Strattonville, Pennsylvania. He had contracted the disease in about 1915. Detrick may or may not have married a Janet L. Hughes in Manhattan on December 16, 1920. His death certificate says that he was married but does not give the name of his spouse. Detrick was a school teacher, presumably in his home county. I have taken the leap and have assumed that he was also a teller of weird tales who wrote three stories for "The Unique Magazine" published in 1925-1926. The last, "The Kidnapper's Hands," appeared in the February 1926 issue. Walter Guy Detrick, the Pennsylvania teacher, died of pulmonary tuberculosis two months later, on April 17, 1926. He was just forty-one years old.

Walter G. Detrick's Stories in Weird Tales

"Through the Horn Gate" (Apr. 1925)

"Dead Hands" (June 1925)

"The Kidnapper's Story" (Feb. 1926)

Further Reading

None known.

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Percy B. Prior (?-?)

June 5, 2015, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Frank Owen (1893-1968)

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Hobbyist, Author, Poet
Born ?
Died ?

Who was Percy B. Prior? Here's a start:

Percy B. Prior is an Australian writer from Sydney who is in close contact with the splendid work Rotary is doing there. (The Rotarian, Jan. 1931)

Was he the writer for Weird Tales? Well, he was interested in weird things:

Wanted snapshots of all kinds of strange, odd, or unique things, such as happenings, freaks of nature, old and historic scenes, birds and animals, etc. For these will exchange good quality postage stamps or city and beauty snapshots in return. Percy B. Prior. 15 Philpott Street. Marrickville. N.S.W. (The World's News, Nov. 28, 1928)

Maybe he was a kind of Charles Fort or Robert Ripley of Down Under. So what did he write? Here's a partial list:

"A Song of Thanksgiving" (1916)
"It Pays To Hatch Early" (article) in American Poultry Journal (Mar. 1921)
"A Serviceable Bench Stop" (article) in The Popular Science Monthly (Feb. 1922)
"To Our Flag" (poem) in The Newcastle Sun (Apr. 17, 1923)
"Dreams of Youth" and "My 'El Dorado'" (poems) in The Newcastle Sun (May 8, 1923)
"Why the Cake Fell" (article) in The Farmer's Wife (Sept. 1926)
"Strange Farms" (article) in Complete Novel Magazine (Feb. 1927)
"'Here Is My Heart'" (short story) in Sweetheart Stories (Feb. 28, 1928)
"Canberra: Will It Become the Real Capital of Australia?" (article) in The Rotarian (Oct. 1928)
"Useful Hints on Flashlight Photography for the Novice with a Camera" (article) in Camera Craft (1929)
Four-part series on Australian Aborigines in The Afro-American (beginning July 6, 1929)
"Concerning Ostrich Feathers" (article) in Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine (Dec. 1929)
"Radio Around the World" (article) in The Rotarian (Apr. 1934)
"Christmas Again" (poem) in Anniston Star (Dec. 21, 1943); West African Advent Messenger (Dec. 1959); Australasian Record and Advent World Survey (Dec. 12, 1960)
"Sweetheart, You Are My Guiding Star"

Prior also had a good run in Weird Tales with three stories published in less than a year in 1927-1928. And he was a hobbyist, including being a philatelist and a photographer. And that's all I know about the man who was perhaps the only native Australian to contribute to Weird Tales.

Percy B. Prior's Stories in Weird Tales
"The El Dorado of Death" (July 1927)
"When the Dead Return" (Dec. 1927)
"The Tree-Man Ghost" (Mar. 1928)

Further Reading

"The Tree-Man Ghost" was reprinted in 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (1993). It's a fine little tale and may very well have been based on a traditional Scottish ghost story.

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Frank Owen (1893-1968)

June 6, 2015, 3:00 am

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Aka Roswell Williams, Richard Kent, Hung Long Tom
Author, Poet, Editor
Born April 20, 1893, Kings County, New York, presumably in Brooklyn
Died October 13, 1968, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York

Frank Owen was a prolific author, poet, and editor, yet almost nothing is known of him, and what people think they know about him is in many places wrong. First, his name was not really Roswell Williams or Richard Kent. Those were pseudonyms. His real name was Frank Owen. Second, his co-author, Ethel Owen, was not his wife but his sister. His wife's name was Lillian. Frank Owen wrote stories and poems of the Far East, yet his parents came from Wales and he seems to have spent most of his life in Brooklyn. The only exception may have been time spent in the U.S. military, which earned him a place of burial at Long Island National Cemetery, not far from where he was born. The New York Times noticed his passing, yet fans and scholars of pulp fiction seem to have skipped over him, despite the fact that he was number eleven on the list of the most prolific authors in Weird Tales. One of those fans has asked me to find out more on the life and career of Frank Owen. This is what I have discovered.

According to Roger M. Evans on an online genealogical message board, "[i]n 1884, Henry and Henrietta Owens [sic] emigrated to New York from Aberdare in South Wales together with their five children, Agnes (1875), Margaret (1877), Ralph (1880), Gertude (1881), [and] Florence (1883). Four further children were born in New York: Mabel (1885), Nellie (1888), Ethel (1890), and Frank (1890) [sic]." Mr. Evans inquired about the Owen family, about whom he had found only a little information. A researcher named Nancy answered his inquiry with the following information, with my editing and some additions on birthplaces:

Henry Owen, b. April 1855, in Wales; d. Dec. 13, 1932, Kings County cert. #23985

Henriette [sic] Owen, b. Aug. 1856, in Wales; d. Nov. 10, 1941, Kings County cert. #21782

Their children:

Agnes A. Owen, b. Aug. 1875, in Wales; d. Mar. 25, 1938, Kings County cert. #6603
Margaret Owen, b. Nov. 1877, in Wales; d. June 24, 1943, Kings County cert. #14040
Ralph Owen, b. Feb. 2, 1880, in Wales; married Lillian Ruschmann on Sept. 18, 1906, Kings County cert. #8513; daughter Muriel R. born about 1914; married June 12, 1937, Kings County; Ralph died June 29, 1946, Kings County cert. #13469
Gertrude M. Owen, b. Nov. 1881, in Wales; last found in 1920 Census in Kings County
Florence Owen, b. July 1885, in England; last found in 1920 Census in Kings County
Mabel Owen, b. Oct 1885, in New York; last found in 1920 Census in Kings County
Nellie Owen, b. Mar. 1888; last found in 1910 Census Kings County
Ethel Owen, b. Aug. 1890, in New York; d. Nov. 17, 1946, Kings County
Frank Owen, b. Apr. 20, 1893, in New York; died Oct. 1968, Kings County

So Frank Owen was born on April 20, 1893, in Kings County, New York, presumably in Brooklyn. He was the second son and the youngest child of Welsh immigrants Henry and Henrietta Owen. Mr. Owen was a real estate broker. His daughters were cashiers, waitresses, stenographers, bookkeepers, and secretaries. His son Ralph was a photographer. Frank and Ethel became writers. The Owens seem to have been a tight-knit group. As late as 1920, Mr. and Mrs. Owen shared their home with seven of their children, all of whom were by then well into adulthood.

By 1930, Frank Owen had married and had fathered two sons, Richard (born 1922) and Owen K. Owen (born 1930). Frank's wife was Lillian Owen, a native Pennsylvanian born on February 5, 1898, thus five years his junior. The Owens made their home in Brooklyn. There they were enumerated again in 1940, and there Frank died, at home at 21 Adler Place, on October 13, 1968. He was seventy-five years old. His wife survived him by less than a year, passing away on April 12, 1969, just eight days before his birthday. Both were buried at Long Island National Cemetery in East Farmingdale, New York, in what I believe to be adjoining plots (Plot 2r, 3163 and 3363).

Next: Frank Owen's Stories and Poems.

Text and captions copyright 2015 Terence E. Hanley

↧

Frank Owen's Stories and Poems

June 7, 2015, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Frank Owen's Books

≪ Previous: Frank Owen (1893-1968)

If The FictionMags Index is accurate and complete, then Frank Owen's writing career began with a story called "Broken to the Halter" in Young's Magazine for January 1915. Owen was then twenty-two years old. Over the next two decades, he wrote thirty stories for Young's, Lippincott's, Snappy Stories, Breezy Stories, Brief Stories, Droll Stories, and other story magazines and pulp magazines. Following is a list taken from The FictionMags Index (with punctuation added):

Frank Owen's Stories in Story Magazines and Pulp Magazines, 1915-1934

"Broken to the Halter" in Young’s Magazine (Jan. 1915)
"The Undecided Woman" in Lippincott’s Magazine (Feb. 1915)
"Without Rehearsal" in Snappy Stories (Sept. #2 1915)
"Plated Ware" in Young’s Magazine (Nov. 1915)
"Whirlpools" in Breezy Stories (Jan. 1917)
"The Yellow Pool" in Brief Stories (Nov. 1923)
"The Black Well of Wadi" in Brief Stories (Jan. 1924)
"The Show Girl" in Breezy Stories (June #1 1924)
"The Exhibition" in Brief Stories (July 1924)
"The High Note of the Chorus" in Droll Stories (July 1924)
"A Lady in His Room" in Droll Stories (Aug. 1924)
"The Meteor" in Brief Stories (Sept. 1924)
"The Town-Painter" in Droll Stories (Feb. 1925)
"Short Turns" in Breezy Stories (May #1 1925)
"His New Model" in Artists and Models Magazine (May 1925)
"Hard Lines" in Droll Stories (July 1925)
"My China Girl" in Brief Stories (Aug. 1925)
"Sleepy Eyes" in Droll Stories (Jan. 1926)
"Making Emma Bad" in Droll Stories (Mar. 1926)
"Encore" in Droll Stories (Apr. 1926)
"Slow Curtain" in Droll Stories (May 1926)
"Broadwayfarers" in Droll Stories (Apr. 1927)
"Pale Pink Porcelain" in Mystery Magazine (Apr. 1927)
"Bubbles’ Troubles" in Droll Stories (May 1927)
"A Safe and Sane Fourth" in Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine (May 1927)
"The Settlement Worker" in Droll Stories (June 1927)
"Hope of Broadway" in Sweetheart Stories (Sept. 6, 1927)
"The Slip Knot" in Cabaret Stories (Sept. 1928)
"Divorce Party" in Honeymoon Stories (Dec. 1933)
"Intrusion" in The Underworld Magazine (Mar. 1934)

About halfway through that stretch, Frank Owen began selling stories and poems to Weird Tales magazine. His first was "The Man Who Owned the World" in the October issue of 1923. His debut in that magazine coincided with the first story by H.P. Lovecraft in Weird Tales, "Dagon," also Seabury Quinn's first story and article.

Frank Owen's career writing for Weird Tales and its companion magazines, Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, is not easy to sort out. He contributed stories and poems to all three titles. In doing so, he used three names, his own, plus "Richard Kent" and the unambiguously obscene "Hung Long Tom." All of his stories for Weird Tales were published under his own name, as were two letters he wrote to "The Eyrie." All his poems for Weird Tales were as by the aforementioned Hung Long Tom. As for Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, there were three stories with the Richard Kent byline, five stories with the Frank Owen byline, and eighteen poems with the Hung Long Tom byline. In the first few issues of Oriental Stories, he had at least two and as many four works in each issue.

So, for Weird Tales, Frank Owen wrote thirty-four stories and five poems. For Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, he wrote eight stories and eighteen poems. All together, then, Frank Owen wrote forty-two stories and twenty-three poems for the three magazines, sixty-five works in all, plus two letters. He was one of few writers to contribute to all three. His thirty-four stories place him as the eleventh most prolific author of stories for Weird Tales, just behind Allison V. Harding, another New Yorker whose work has not very often been reprinted. Here is part of the list from my posting "Who Wrote the Most Stories for Weird Tales?" (Nov. 14, 2011, here):

Seabury Quinn, 145 stories and 14 articles
August W. Derleth, 101 stories under his own name, plus 13 stories under the pseudonym Stephen Grendon (114 total), plus 22 stories in collaboration with others
Edmond Hamilton, 76 stories
Robert Bloch, 66
Clark Ashton Smith, 63
Robert E. Howard, 54
H.P. Lovecraft, 49 stories on his own, plus 4 in collaboration with others, not counting revisions and ghost-written stories
Manly Wade Wellman, 39 stories on his own, plus 1 in collaboration with others
Paul Ernst, 37
Allison V. Harding, 36
Frank Owen, 34

"The Wind That Tramps the World," from April 1925, was voted the second most popular story of that issue (behind "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis). It was reprinted twice in Weird Tales and voted fortieth in popularity of all stories published from 1924 to 1940. It's worth noting that the titles of four of Owen's stories took the form of "The Man Who _____." It's also worth noting that Owen had at least two series characters, John Steppling and Dr. Shen Fu, possessor of an elixir of life. Anyway, here's a list:

Frank Owen's, Richard Kent's, and Hung Long Tom's Stories and Poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine

(All are stories unless otherwise noted, all are as by Frank Owen unless otherwise noted, and all are in Weird Tales unless otherwise noted.)

"The Man Who Owned the World" (Oct. 1923)
"The Open Window" (John Steppling, Jan. 1924)
"Shadows" (Apr. 1924)
"The Man Who Lived Next Door to Himself" (May/June/July 1924)
"Hunger" (Feb. 1925)
"The Wind That Tramps the World" (John Steppling, Apr. 1925; reprinted June 1929, Fall 1981)
"Black Hill" (June 1925)
"The Lantern-Maker" (Aug. 1925)
"The Yellow Pool" (Oct. 1925)
"The Fan" (John Steppling, Dec. 1925)
"The Silent Trees" (May 1926)
"Seven Minutes" (Oct. 1926)
"The Dream Peddler" (Jan. 1927)
"The Blue City" (Sept. 1927)
"The Purple Sea" (Feb. 1928)
"The Tinkle of the Camel's Bell" (Dec. 1928)
"The Desert Woman" as by Richard Kent in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)
"Singapore Nights" in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)
"Flower Profiles" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Oct./Nov. 1930)
"The Yellow River" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Oct./Nov. 1930)
"The Burning Sea" as by Richard Kent in Oriental Stories (Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"The China Kid" in Oriental Stories (Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"The Rose" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"The Rug" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"Scoundrels by Night" as by Richard Kent in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931; reprinted in Short Story Magazine #18, 1946)
"Della Wu, Chinese Courtezan" in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931)
"The Giant" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Feb./Mar. 1931)
"Hsun Hsu" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Apr./May/June 1931)
"The Mirror" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Apr./May/June 1931)
"Song of the Indian Night" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1931)
"Yung Chi" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Summer 1931)
"The Golden Girl" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Autumn 1931)
"Night" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Autumn 1931)
"Porcelain" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Autumn 1931)
"Yellow Velvet" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Autumn 1931)
"The Mystic Rose" as by Hung Long Tom in Oriental Stories (poem, Winter 1932)
"The Nanking Road" as by Hung Long Tom in The Magic Carpet Magazine (poem, Jan. 1933)
"Gifts" as by Hung Long Tom in The Magic Carpet Magazine (poem, Apr. 1933)
"Dancers" as by Hung Long Tom in The Magic Carpet Magazine (poem, July 1933)
"The Green Sea" as by Hung Long Tom (poem, Aug. 1933)
"Rain" as by Hung Long Tom (poem, Sept. 1933)
"The Pool" as by Hung Long Tom in The Magic Carpet Magazine (poem, Oct. 1933)
"The Ox-Cart" (Dec. 1933)
"Five Merchants Who Met in a Tea-House" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1934)
"Rivers" as by Hung Long Tom in The Magic Carpet Magazine (poem, Jan. 1934)
"The Lantern" as by Hung Long Tom (poem, Feb. 1934)
"Pale Pink Porcelain" (Dec. 1934; 1929)
"Tea-Drinking" as by Hung Long Tom (poem, May 1935)
"Night Song" as by Hung Long Tom (poem, Sept. 1935)
"The Man Who Would Not Die" (Feb. 1936)
"The Poppy Pearl" (Feb. 1937)
"The Mandarin's Ear" (Aug. 1937)
"On Pell Street" (July 1940)
"By What Mystic Mooring" (May 1941)
"The March of the Trees" (Mar. 1942)
"For Tomorrow We Die" (Dr. Shen Fu, July 1942)
"The Lips of Caya Wu" (Nov. 1942)
"Quest of a Noble Tiger" (Jan. 1943)
"The Man Who Amazed Fish" (Dr. Shen Fu, May 1943)
"The Street of Faces" (July 1943)
"Death in a Gray Mist" (Sept. 1943)
"The Long Still Streets of Evening" (Sept. 1944)
"The Three Pools and the Painted Moon" (Sept. 1950)
"The Old Gentleman with the Scarlet Umbrella" (John Steppling, Jan. 1951)
"The Unicorn" (Nov. 1952)

Frank Owen's Letters to "The Eyrie"

May 1943

Sept. 1944

We're not through with the complications just yet. In addition to writing stories published in magazines, Frank Owen also wrote stories published in his own books. I'll start with the books:

The Wind that Tramps the World: Splashes of Chinese Color(New York: Lantern Press, 1929)

"The Wind That Tramps the World"

"Pale Pink Porcelain"

"The Month the Almonds Bloom"

"The Inverted House"

"The Blue City"

"The Frog"

"The Snapped Willow"

The Purple Sea: More Splashes of Chinese Color (New York: Lantern Press, 1930)

"The Golden Hour of Kwoh Fan" (reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader #11, 1949)

"The Purple Sea"

"The Silent Trees" (reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader #3, 1947)

"The Lantern-Maker"

"Gobi Interlude"

"The Perfumes of Chow Wan"

"The Quaint Manuscript of Wu Wang"

"The Rice Merchant"

"Love Letters of a Little House"

"The Tinkle of the Camel's Bell" (reprinted in Vampire: Chilling Tales of the Undead, ed. by Peter Haining, 1985)

"The Old Man Who Swept the Sky"

The Porcelain Magician: A Collection of Oriental Fantasies (New York: Gnome Press, 1948)

Interior artwork by Frances E. Dunn

Foreword (The Porcelain Magician), an essay by David A. Kyle

"The Fan"

"The Inverted House"

"The Lantern-Maker"

"The Porcelain Magician"

"The Purple Sea"

"The Old Man Who Swept the Sky"

"Doctor Shen Fu"

"Pale Pink Porcelain"

"The Rice Merchant"

"The Blue City"

"The Fountain"

"Monk's Blood"

"The Golden Hour of Kwoh Fan"

"The Wind That Tramps the World"

As you can see by comparing titles and dates of publication, some of Owen's stories appeared in Weird Tales and its companion magazines before they were published in hardback, some were published in hardback before appearing in the magazines, some appeared only in magazines, and some appeared only in hardback. (I think. Whew!) In addition, Frank Owen had two stories published in periodicals other than Weird Tales and its companion titles:

"A Study in Amber" as by Richard Kent in Avon Fantasy Reader #5 (1947)
"One-Man God" in Avon Fantasy Reader #17 (1951) and in the digest-sized Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader (Jan. 1953)

There have been a few recent reprintings, but all in all, Frank Owen has been largely forgotten by readers of fantasy and weird fiction. I don't know why that should be. Maybe it's time for a new collection of his stories and poems.

Next: Frank Owen's Books

Weird Tales, January 1943, with a cover story by Frank Owen and cover art by A. R. Tilburne.

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