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.
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.
A number of the fictioneers wrote mysteries, and Matheson followed them, though he had no great interest in the genre. He published short stories and a couple of mystery novels. (Matheson’s restless energy would have him writing westerns and romances at various parts of his career, too.) He also started reading science fiction—a genre that he’d not grown up with—and broke in: another market. Soon enough, he was well established, particularly in Horace Gold’s Galaxy—a successor to Campbell’s Astounding, even as Campbell was still helming Astounding—and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
In the middle of the decades, he put out a couple of novels that became classics in the field, blending, to various degrees, horror and science fiction and fantasy: I am Legend, from 1954, a vampire tale that aimed to offer a scientifically plausible explanation of vampirism, but succeeded better one establishing the conventions of the zombie story; and The Incredible Shrinking Man, in 1956. A the end of the decade, he wrote a memoir based on his army experience, The Beardless Warriors. Nonetheless, he continued to struggle with his confidence, and moved back and forth between the coasts, before finding his footing.
As with others of the Sorcerers, Matheson moved into television and movie scriptwriting, even as he continued to publish novels and short stories. He wrote many episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” including the standard bearer, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He also adapted a number of Poe films for the big screen and was associated with Hammer Films. Later, he wrote for “Kolchak” and for an early Steven Spielberg television production.
A few years ago, “Atlantic” magazine attempted to explain Matheson’s success writing for Hollywood: “Matheson's writing lends itself particularly well to contemporary Hollywood because it's "high concept"--which translates, in screenwriting parlance, to "easy to pitch." At the heart of Matheson's best tales you'll find a simple, compelling question, from I Am Legend ("what if a mass epidemic left a single man alive?") to "Button, Button," the short story that became The Box ("would a needy family sacrifice the life of a complete stranger for a massive financial windfall?"). Hollywood loves these kinds of stories because they're easy to understand and therefore easy to mass-market.”
Richard Matheson died 23 June 2013 in Los Angeles. He was 87.
************
I know when Matheson happened on to Fort—a fact that I do not know about so many of the Forteans—though credit for this discovery belongs to Paul Stuve, a collector who purchased the key correspondence at auction and kindly shared relevant bits with me. The cause of Matheson’s Forteanism was George Haas, collector of weird tales and (late in life) Clark Ashton Smith’s closest friend. Haas is an under-recognized Fortean and fantasy fan.
On 9 September 1950, Matheson wrote Haas saying he was reading Fort—“You were right”—from which he was getting “endless story ideas.” He’d been a Fortean for a long time, Matheson said, without knowing it, and was wondering how to join the Fortean Society. Haas sent the information for joining, but tried to dissuade him as well, telling how Thayer had been so high-handed with Chapter Two—the organization of Bay Area Forteans. It didn’t seem to take much to keep Matheson out of the Society: Haas must have sent him a copy of Doubt, because Matheson said he was not impressed with the issue he had looked at: “They seem to go way the hell off the road that Charlie was treading. I never read such goddam iconoclastic, sneering words in my life. They sound as stupidly pedantic as the scientists that Fort was berating. That's going hogwild. I think they missed the boat. I still have a great regard for those four books. But not for what his "disciples" have seemingly done with his wishes.” He never seemed to join, and the name Matheson was mentioned only once in Doubt, from a 1947 issue that must have referred to someone else.
Matheson’s enthusiasm is clear, though not its substance, so much. Clearly, as with many other Fortean writers, he found Fort a fount of story ideas, particularly fantastic ones. But there may have been other affinities, too. The Guardian newspaper, in its obituary, noted “Solitary, bewildered men recur in Matheson's work.” That’s a fair description of Fort, at that, a solitary, bewildered man, and it may be that Matheson found in Fort not just someone whose imagination eh could respect, but whose persona echoed some aspect of his own. Matheson himself put it slightly differently: “The leitmotif of all my work . . . is as follows: The individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive.” This was a leitmotif of Forteanism in the decade-and-a-half after the end of World War II, as well, however much otherwise separated Matheson from the Fortean Society.
In that same letter, Matheson said he was working up a story based on something he read in “Wild Talents.” That was “Witch War.” It appeared in Startling Stories, July 1951, and dealt with wars being waged by a group of girls with psychic powers—which fictionalized a passage from Fort: “ A squad of poltergeists-girls—and they pick a fleet out of the sea, or out of the sky—if, as far back as the year 1923, something picked French aeroplanes out of the sky—arguing that some nations that renounced fleets, as obsolete, would go on building them, just the same. Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum. A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches, Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Re-enforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battle field. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.”
Matheson made the connection between this story and Fort explicit in a postscript he added to the tale in his collected stories: Fort “practically wrote the story itself,” he said. “Not that completely—in one section of one of his huge books.” (He thought it was Lo! or “Book of the Damned.”) He called the place where the witches worked the PG Center “and a lot of people thought wrongly that it meant to spell Pretty Girl Center, but what I meant it to be was ‘Poltergeist Center.’ Because that’s what these girls essentially were—controllable poltergeists.”
Around this time—according to the same source—Matheson started playing with a cycle of Fortean stories. They were to be set in Fort College, in Indiana, modeled after the school he’d attended, the University of Missouri. The setting is about the only thing that unifies the stories—otherwise the series comprises tales of monstrous pregnancies, time travel, haunted houses, zombies, and alien contact, among other topics. In its way, Fort College was the fictional fulfillment of Thayer's Fortean University. The first of these stories was “Return,” which ran in Thrilling Wonder Stories (October 1951), then edited by Fortean Sam Merwin. Its sequel “F—-“ (retitled “Foodlegger” to avoid the appearance of obscenity) showed up in the April 1952 issue of the same magazine, by which time editorship had been turned over to Samuel Mines. These were time travel tales.
“Mountains of the Mind” was published in Marvel Science Fiction (November 1951). “Mother by Protest,” the story about an impossible pregnancy, ran in “Fantastic” (September-October 1953). It was later republished under the name “Trespass” and in the 1970s Matheson rewrote it as a television movie. “SRL ad” came out in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (April 1952); it told—possibly, the narrator was unreliable—of an alien looking for a human mate through a Saturday Review of Literature (SRL) ad—Saturday Review, of course having been supportive of Fort and Forteanism in the 1940s, though I do not know if Matheson realized the connection. “Mad House,” a haunted house story with a poltergeist twist—the house is imbued with the moral energy of its occupants—showed up in Fantastic (Jan-Feb 1953). “Lazarus II,” about the horrors of brining the dead back to life, was also published in Fantastic (July 1953), that magazine then edited by Sam Mines. “The Traveller” did not appear in magazine form until the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction republished it in 1962; but it first appeared in 1954. It was also a time travel tale. “An Element Never Forgets,” though written about this time, the early to mid 1950s, was first published in 2010.
Matheson later noted that there had been some plan on his part to collate these into a book, but he never did write enough to fill an entire collection. And it seems, based on what did happen, he chose to put a good portion of these into his first short story collection, instead, obviating the necessity of a Fort College compilation. “Born of Man and Woman,” which appeared in 1954, carried four of the eight Fort College stories, including the first publication of “The Traveller,” as well as the Fortean “Witch War.” His second collection, “Third From the Sun,” which came out in 1955, also carried four of the eight, though a different four, and not “Witch War.”
It would seem, in retrospect, that by the mid 1950s, Matheson had burned out his interest in Fort. He left the collection unmade, and stopped writing Fort College stories. I see no strong evidence of a Fortean element in his later fiction. Fired by Fort’s imagination just at the time he was making a name for himself and looking for story ideas, he was deeply interested in Fort—but then he got married, got established, had children, and left Fort behind.
In the middle of the decades, he put out a couple of novels that became classics in the field, blending, to various degrees, horror and science fiction and fantasy: I am Legend, from 1954, a vampire tale that aimed to offer a scientifically plausible explanation of vampirism, but succeeded better one establishing the conventions of the zombie story; and The Incredible Shrinking Man, in 1956. A the end of the decade, he wrote a memoir based on his army experience, The Beardless Warriors. Nonetheless, he continued to struggle with his confidence, and moved back and forth between the coasts, before finding his footing.
As with others of the Sorcerers, Matheson moved into television and movie scriptwriting, even as he continued to publish novels and short stories. He wrote many episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” including the standard bearer, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He also adapted a number of Poe films for the big screen and was associated with Hammer Films. Later, he wrote for “Kolchak” and for an early Steven Spielberg television production.
A few years ago, “Atlantic” magazine attempted to explain Matheson’s success writing for Hollywood: “Matheson's writing lends itself particularly well to contemporary Hollywood because it's "high concept"--which translates, in screenwriting parlance, to "easy to pitch." At the heart of Matheson's best tales you'll find a simple, compelling question, from I Am Legend ("what if a mass epidemic left a single man alive?") to "Button, Button," the short story that became The Box ("would a needy family sacrifice the life of a complete stranger for a massive financial windfall?"). Hollywood loves these kinds of stories because they're easy to understand and therefore easy to mass-market.”
Richard Matheson died 23 June 2013 in Los Angeles. He was 87.
************
I know when Matheson happened on to Fort—a fact that I do not know about so many of the Forteans—though credit for this discovery belongs to Paul Stuve, a collector who purchased the key correspondence at auction and kindly shared relevant bits with me. The cause of Matheson’s Forteanism was George Haas, collector of weird tales and (late in life) Clark Ashton Smith’s closest friend. Haas is an under-recognized Fortean and fantasy fan.
On 9 September 1950, Matheson wrote Haas saying he was reading Fort—“You were right”—from which he was getting “endless story ideas.” He’d been a Fortean for a long time, Matheson said, without knowing it, and was wondering how to join the Fortean Society. Haas sent the information for joining, but tried to dissuade him as well, telling how Thayer had been so high-handed with Chapter Two—the organization of Bay Area Forteans. It didn’t seem to take much to keep Matheson out of the Society: Haas must have sent him a copy of Doubt, because Matheson said he was not impressed with the issue he had looked at: “They seem to go way the hell off the road that Charlie was treading. I never read such goddam iconoclastic, sneering words in my life. They sound as stupidly pedantic as the scientists that Fort was berating. That's going hogwild. I think they missed the boat. I still have a great regard for those four books. But not for what his "disciples" have seemingly done with his wishes.” He never seemed to join, and the name Matheson was mentioned only once in Doubt, from a 1947 issue that must have referred to someone else.
Matheson’s enthusiasm is clear, though not its substance, so much. Clearly, as with many other Fortean writers, he found Fort a fount of story ideas, particularly fantastic ones. But there may have been other affinities, too. The Guardian newspaper, in its obituary, noted “Solitary, bewildered men recur in Matheson's work.” That’s a fair description of Fort, at that, a solitary, bewildered man, and it may be that Matheson found in Fort not just someone whose imagination eh could respect, but whose persona echoed some aspect of his own. Matheson himself put it slightly differently: “The leitmotif of all my work . . . is as follows: The individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive.” This was a leitmotif of Forteanism in the decade-and-a-half after the end of World War II, as well, however much otherwise separated Matheson from the Fortean Society.
In that same letter, Matheson said he was working up a story based on something he read in “Wild Talents.” That was “Witch War.” It appeared in Startling Stories, July 1951, and dealt with wars being waged by a group of girls with psychic powers—which fictionalized a passage from Fort: “ A squad of poltergeists-girls—and they pick a fleet out of the sea, or out of the sky—if, as far back as the year 1923, something picked French aeroplanes out of the sky—arguing that some nations that renounced fleets, as obsolete, would go on building them, just the same. Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum. A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches, Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Re-enforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battle field. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.”
Matheson made the connection between this story and Fort explicit in a postscript he added to the tale in his collected stories: Fort “practically wrote the story itself,” he said. “Not that completely—in one section of one of his huge books.” (He thought it was Lo! or “Book of the Damned.”) He called the place where the witches worked the PG Center “and a lot of people thought wrongly that it meant to spell Pretty Girl Center, but what I meant it to be was ‘Poltergeist Center.’ Because that’s what these girls essentially were—controllable poltergeists.”
Around this time—according to the same source—Matheson started playing with a cycle of Fortean stories. They were to be set in Fort College, in Indiana, modeled after the school he’d attended, the University of Missouri. The setting is about the only thing that unifies the stories—otherwise the series comprises tales of monstrous pregnancies, time travel, haunted houses, zombies, and alien contact, among other topics. In its way, Fort College was the fictional fulfillment of Thayer's Fortean University. The first of these stories was “Return,” which ran in Thrilling Wonder Stories (October 1951), then edited by Fortean Sam Merwin. Its sequel “F—-“ (retitled “Foodlegger” to avoid the appearance of obscenity) showed up in the April 1952 issue of the same magazine, by which time editorship had been turned over to Samuel Mines. These were time travel tales.
“Mountains of the Mind” was published in Marvel Science Fiction (November 1951). “Mother by Protest,” the story about an impossible pregnancy, ran in “Fantastic” (September-October 1953). It was later republished under the name “Trespass” and in the 1970s Matheson rewrote it as a television movie. “SRL ad” came out in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (April 1952); it told—possibly, the narrator was unreliable—of an alien looking for a human mate through a Saturday Review of Literature (SRL) ad—Saturday Review, of course having been supportive of Fort and Forteanism in the 1940s, though I do not know if Matheson realized the connection. “Mad House,” a haunted house story with a poltergeist twist—the house is imbued with the moral energy of its occupants—showed up in Fantastic (Jan-Feb 1953). “Lazarus II,” about the horrors of brining the dead back to life, was also published in Fantastic (July 1953), that magazine then edited by Sam Mines. “The Traveller” did not appear in magazine form until the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction republished it in 1962; but it first appeared in 1954. It was also a time travel tale. “An Element Never Forgets,” though written about this time, the early to mid 1950s, was first published in 2010.
Matheson later noted that there had been some plan on his part to collate these into a book, but he never did write enough to fill an entire collection. And it seems, based on what did happen, he chose to put a good portion of these into his first short story collection, instead, obviating the necessity of a Fort College compilation. “Born of Man and Woman,” which appeared in 1954, carried four of the eight Fort College stories, including the first publication of “The Traveller,” as well as the Fortean “Witch War.” His second collection, “Third From the Sun,” which came out in 1955, also carried four of the eight, though a different four, and not “Witch War.”
It would seem, in retrospect, that by the mid 1950s, Matheson had burned out his interest in Fort. He left the collection unmade, and stopped writing Fort College stories. I see no strong evidence of a Fortean element in his later fiction. Fired by Fort’s imagination just at the time he was making a name for himself and looking for story ideas, he was deeply interested in Fort—but then he got married, got established, had children, and left Fort behind.
