​John Wood Campbell, Jr., was born 8 June 1910 in Newark, New Jersey to John W. Campbell and the former Dorothy Strahern. Raised in middle class material comfort—his father was an engineer—but great emotional turmoil, caught in the triangle between a distant father, an unpredictable mother, and a resentful aunt (his mother’s twin), Campbell turned to science and engineering: by accounts, he was reading astronomy and physics books as early as eight years old, and tinkering on bicycles. He would always appreciate scientists and engineers as cultural heroes, doing what needed to be done, changing and perfecting the human race. Campbell went to the private Blair Academy and did not do well, but got into MIT anyway.

He discovered science fiction in his teens. The genre was just beginning to take shape. There were scientific romances and adventure stories from older generations—Poe and Verne—as well as stories along those lines being produced by contemporary authors—Wells, Burroughs, Doyle—but it was Hugo Gernsback who was consolidating science fiction into a recognizable genre. His Amazing Stories came out in 1926. At MIT, Campbell wanted to buy a car, but his father refused, and so he turned to writing stories for the new science fiction market, and found himself successful enough. He finished MIT (did he?) but also continued writing under a couple of names.

His John W. Campbell byline went with stories of what he called, in a clever spoonerism, “thud and blunder,” tales of galactic derring-do and adventure. Under a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, he worked out more thoughtful, though also deeply pessimistic, narratives. These often lacked a robust plot, but made of for it with their considerations of the limits of science and human knowledge. He also used the names Karl van Campen and Arthur McCann.

​A partnered pair of science fictional Forteans.

Fredric Brown was born 29 October 1906 in Cincinnati. He graduated from Hanover College in Indiana, and settled for a long time in Milwaukee, where he worked in the printing trade, also doing proofreading. He married a woman named Helen Ruth in 1929, and they started a family, Helen giving birth to a two boys. Apparently, Brown had only known Helen through correspondence before they married. The Depression was hard on the Brown’s, and Fredric eked by, while also turning out short mysteries, that he began to sell to magazines in the 1930s. He once hoboed to Los Angeles trying to drum up work, and did turns as a detective and dish washer.

He sold his first short story in 1937, and there followed a mess of tales, their fates difficult to follow. But by the early 1940s, he had hit a groove. Brown was part of Allied Authors, a competitor of the Milwaukee Fictioneers, the later of which included Ray Palmer, Stanley Weinbaum, Roger Herman Shoar (who wrote under the name Ralph Milne Farley), and Robert Bloch, among others. As Bloch remembered Brown from the early 1940s, he was small and fine-boned, with a neat mustache. His apartment had a Siamese cat named Ming Tah, a wooden recorder that he played, a chess set, and a typewriter. Brown enjoyed his alcohol quite a bit.

Beginning in 1943, according to his biographer, “Brown’s short story output from this point on is more manageable, as he began to rework several themes that reveal interesting facets of his concerns.” In addition to mysteries, Brown wrote science fiction, fantasies, and hybrids of the various genres. He was known for his word play and trick endings, and much admired for his craftsmanship. Ideas could be difficult, though, and Bloch remembers Brown hopping on buses and riding across the country when he was was blocked, looking for inspiration. He became an innovator by being contrarian and focusing on the small bore: rather than penning grand space operas, he looked at the problems of science, the failures of rocketry.

​Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born28 July 1909 in New Brighton, England, scion of a comfortable bourgeois family. Educated well, he rejected his patrimony and went to sea. Most of the rest of his life would be marked by tramping and alcohol.  He did return home, and graduated from Cambridge. He then went to London; he met his wife, Jan Gabriel, in Spain and married her in France in 1934. In 1933, he published his first novel, “Ultramarine” based open his time at sea. Like Thomas Wolfe, Lowry’s fiction would grow directly out of his own experiences. There followed much more travel. 

He started writing the novel that would make his name, “Under the Volcano” in southern California in 1936—where he was also trying to break into Hollywood. In November, he and Jan moved to Mexico, for what was supposed to be a short stay but turned out to be long. Jan, tired of his drinking, left him, and he continued to write and drink, spiraling out of control, deported, and finally put up by his family in Los Angeles. There he met his second wife, Margerie Bonner. They ended up in a shack in Vancouver, where he and Margerie continued to work on Under the Volcano. The book was about his alcoholic descent—fictionalized as the struggles of a British consul—but he was imbuing it with spiritual, cosmological, and political significance, too.

A lot of this resonant material was suggested by an acquaintance Lowry made in 1943. Long interested in the occult and alchemy, Lowry made the acquaintance of Charles Stansfeld Jones, a Vancouverite who was deeply involved in Aleister Crowley’s magical order. Lowry and Margerie practiced yoga, astral projection, and the I Ching with the man they called Stan. Writing in the Fortean Times, Ruth Clydesdale noted, “A list drawn from Stan’s books together with direct quotes form a couple of them found their way into UTV; more importantly, Stan’s experience of misusing magical powers and plunging into the Abyss structured and thematised the novel. Lowry felt that he’d thereby developed the Consul from a mere ‘shallow drunkard’ into a figure of esoteric and allegorical significance. Indeed, Stan’s influence on UTV is s profound that it is hard to imagine what the book would have been like had Lowry never met him.”

​Another science fictional Fortean.

Richard Burton Matheson is a well-known writer, and so there is not much to add to his biography beyond the outlines that can be found in his obituaries and on Wikipedia.

He was born 20 February 1926 in Allendale, New Jersey, to Norwegian immigrants, his father a tile layer and speakeasy operator. The Mathson’s divorced when Richard was eight, and he moved to Brooklyn with his mother, where he attended local schools. Matheson had an early interest in music, writing hundreds of songs in his teens, which followed his literary pursuits: his first story appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle not long after his parents divorced. He also had an interest in physics and studied engineering at Brooklyn Technical High School. 

Matheson enlisted in the army’s pre-engineering program at Cornell to avoid being drafted into the infantry, but ended up in the infantry anyway when the program was cancelled in 1944. He was in combat in Germany. Medically discharged in 1945, Matheson was directionless, ending up back at home for a time before going to journalism school in Missouri. When he graduated in 1949, though, he remained at loose ends; college had stripped him of the Christian Science faith his mother had embraced after her divorce and shared with her children, nor could he find a job in journalism. Like so many writers, he took a job to support his avocation, doing menial night work to free his days. He broke through into the field of fantastic fiction after a fairly brief apprenticeship: his first sale was the now-classic “Born of Man and Woman,” to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was co-edited by Fortean Anthony Boucher. 

Not long after, Matheson moved to southern California—better weather, the movies—and became associated with a group of writers there, “The Fictioneers,” as well as the so-called Southern California Sorcerers, a group of fantastic fiction writers that included Charles Beaumont and Ray Bradbury, among others. (I do not know the relationship between the Fictioneers and the Sorcerers.) He married Ruth Ann Woodson in 1952; they had four children. For a short period, Matheson also worked at Douglas Aircraft and also as a linotype operator.

​Henry Geiger was born 10 August 1908 in Kings County, New York, to Henry and Alice (Van Vleck) Geiger. Henry and Alice were married around 1907, when he was 30 and she was 31, a first marriage for both. At the time of the 1910 census, Henry was a lumber merchant and Alice a housewife. They lived with her family: her parents—her dad was a lawyer—a sister and her husband, another sister, this one not married, and a 16 year-old Austrian servant, all nestled in a house on Flushing Avenue, in Queens. A decade on, Henry and Alice had moved out, to a place on Beekman Street, in Manhattan.

At this point, the elder Henry was teaching music—judging by his and his later career, he had artistic interests, and selling wood was a way to make ends meet. The family had grown, Henry joined by two sisters, Margaret, aged 3, and Ruth, aged 1. Also living with them was one of Alice’s sister’s, Margaret, and a servant. Before the next census, Margaret had left, and the servant girl was gone, leaving just the nuclear unit: Henry, a voice specialist working on his own accord, Alice, Margaret and Ruth in school, an the younger Henry a newspaper reporter. The family was not flush, but not poor either. They rented the apartment at $90 and did have a radio set. During this period, the younger Henry may also have been on Broadway, as a chorus boy, according to an obituary.

At some point in the 1930s, presumably after 1935, the younger Henry picked up and headed west, ending up in Pasadena no later than 1940, when he was noted by the census. He was a writer, scraping by. He made $750 over the previous year, having worked only 35 weeks. Either business was picking up, or he was on a good run, because the past week he’d worked thirty hours. Henry, then aged 32, was boarding with the 54 year-old Elinor K. Once, a Missouri-born widow. The house was nice, worth about $8,500 and Ms. Once was doing well, bringing in just shy of $2,500 per year. The house was about 9 years old.

One measures a circle, beginning anywhere—and so too a Fortean.

For George Allan England’s relationship with Charles Fort and Forteanism is a case of mutual influence.

George Allan England was born 9 February 1877 in Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to George Allen and Hannah Pearl (Lyon) England. (His middle name is often misspelled Allen—which was how his father’s name was written.) The elder England was an army chaplain. In 1880, according to the census, they had three children, Paul, Florence, and young George. His father died in December 1883, in his mid-40s. At some point, George moved out to Massachusetts. He attended English High School in Boston, and matriculated at Harvard, from which his father had graduated in 1862. Probably his move east came around the time of his father’s death, and likely he stayed with family—his father had been born in Vermont.

​What new can be said about Ezra Pound? That he was, in a manner of speaking, a Fortean.

Certainly, there is little reason to rehearse his biography, for my purposes, beyond drawing out those Fortean affinities. Acres of forest have fallen to print not only his voluminous work but the equally voluminous commentary—literary criticism and biographies, one of the latter three books, long, in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages.

So, thumbnailed: He was born 20 October 1885 in Hailey, Idaho but relocated to Pennsylvania before he had turned five. Whipsmart, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania when he was 15, but finished at Hamilton College, graduating in 1905. (Fortean Society Founder Alexander Woollcott graduated from the same school in 1909). Pound was deeply interested in literature and music. During these years, he traveled back and forth to Europe, soaking up its culture and preferring its arts to what he saw as America’s juvenile outpourings.

​A founder of the Society, not much of a Fortean.

John Cowper Powys was once much better known, though there remains a coterie of devoted fans. Born to a reverend in Derbyshire 8 October 1872, Powys was part of a famously talented family of 11 children. He graduated from Cambridge in 1894. He was a teacher and published some poetry. In 1905, he started lecturing in America, winning renown for his philosophical, literary, and historical talks. He was friendly with Theodore Dreiser from early in the century. Although married, Powys took up with a number of women, and established a second long-term relationship in the early 1920s, with a much younger woman. He published his first novel in 1915, then books of literary criticism, autobiographical works, philosophy, and more novels. Powys’s breakthrough move was 1929’s Wolf Solent.

Powys traveled between Britain and the U.S. until the early 1930s. He had anarchist leanings, supporting Emma Goldman and the Republicans in Spain, and staking out positions against both the fascists and Stalinists. (Powys, though, was anti-Semitic, and unhappy when a girlfriend went to work for the Little Blue Books, which was put out by a Jewish man.) He settled in Wales in 1935, and many of his later books were set here, set in the deep past. They are Romantic, with mystic and ecstatic themes. He had a divided reputation, his books not fitting easily into the modernist canon— one biographer said that they were analogically structured, the plot determined by the references, and so surrealistic, in a way—though he had admirers, including Dreiser and Henry Miller. He ha also attracted a number of biographers, and his richly documented life has allowed for experimental investigations of the twentieth-century temper.

Ian Waveney Girvan was in London 10 February 1908 to Alexander Girvan, a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the former Delia Ellen Woods. I do not know about his siblings. Most of the rest of his bio comes from an excellent bit of research done at “Bear Alley Books” several years ago. His mother died when he was about nine, in 1917. His father had been born in Scotland, and Girvan thought of himself as Scotch, despite his London birth. He spent some years in southwest England, returning to London to become a tutor in accounting. At some point, he also invented . . . well, something. I don’t know what, but he called himself an inventor.

He did not serve during World War II because he was director of a business, Security Steel Strapping, Ltd., that had military contracts. At the same time, though, he was very critical of Britain and the war. He was investigated by Buckinghamshire Police in 1940 because of reports he was defeatist and subversive, arguing peace should have been made with Hitler. In 1941, he helped organize a political faction, the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group, and later that year became associated with the Fortean, pacifist, and German-sympathizer Duke of Bedford. Increasingly, Girvan’s political activity came under government scrutiny, and he was closely watched, his newspaper writings, meetings, mail, and telephone calls monitored. A file was opened on him.

​A frustrated Fortean.

I am a little unsure of this biography; the chronology works out, but the details are hard to reconcile. Still.

It seems that John Philip Bessor was born 15 January 1914 in Pennsylvania to George W. lessor and the former Martha Blymer. George’s parents were both from Pennsylvania, as was Martha’s mother, though her father was a Swedish immigrant. They were older parents, George about 46 and Martha 41 when John was born; they had already had two daughters and a son, all four or more years older than John. I cannot find the family in the 1920 census; in 1930, George worked as a clerk for the sanitary works, and had done well, owning his home, then worth about $5,000. Also living with George, Martha, and John, was Elizabeth, one of John’s older sisters, who was married.

In 1940, John was still living with his parents in the Pittsburgh area, as was another sister, Alberta. (She was a music teacher.) The family may have suffered some misfortune during the thirties, as they had moved houses and now owned one worth $1,800. John had just gone out on the job market—he was classified as a “new worker”—after completing his third year of college. According to his obituary, he took sculpture and design courses at Carnegie Institute of Technology and also studied at Edinboro University, majoring in art—Edinboro is a Pennsylvania college.