Newspaper Reporter, Author, Poet, Humorist, Farmer
Born December 1878, Portsmouth, Rhode Island
Died March 27, 1929, Imperial Valley, California, presumably in El Centro
William Sanford was born on December 26, 1878, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to an old New England family. His father was William H. Sanford, a farmer. His mother was Mary Frances (Cobleigh) Sanford, who attended Townsend Female Seminary in Townsend, Massachusetts. William H. Sanford was descended from Peleg Sanford (1751-1789), who served during the Revolutionary War as a private in Captain Isaac Cook's company, Colonel Nathaniel Church's regiment of the Rhode Island militia. A previous Peleg Sanford (1639-1701) was governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations from 1680 to 1683. His father was John Sanford (ca. 1605-1653), also prominent in Rhode Island history. John Sanford's mother-in-law was religious reformer Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), who, with her followers, established Portsmouth. This was only a small part of William Sanford's very large family.
The William H. and Mary F. Sanford family lived in Portsmouth and were counted there in the U.S. censuses of 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920. Their house on Childs Street was called "Morningside," presumably because it was on the east side of Aquidneck Island. There isn't any occupation listed for William Sanford in the 1900 census, but in 1910 he was a newspaper reporter, and in 1920 a writer for magazines. Sanford worked as a reporter for the Fall River (Massachusetts) Evening Herald from about 1906 to about 1911. He began selling humorous items and poems to Life, Judge, Puck, and other magazines and newspapers at about that time. An article from 1915 numbered his credits at more than 2,250 pieces, paragraphs, and short stories. The FictionMags Index lists about 150 of his poems, short stories, and other works for Breezy Stories, Droll Stories, Live Stories, The Parisienne Monthly Magazine, The Smart Set, Snappy Stories, Saucy Stories, Woman's Home Companion, and other titles from 1912 to 1928, with one more credit from 1933. Sanford had five stories in Weird Tales in 1923-1925, including his brief tale of madness and murder, "The Scarlet Night," from March 1923. He also had a story called "The Wife Stealer" in The Black Mask in January 1923.
Sanford began wintering in Florida in the 1920s, in Miami and West Palm Beach. He also visited with his brother in Washington, D.C. The end of the 1920s found him on the opposite end of the country, in the Imperial Valley of far southern California. That's where he checked into a hotel room under the assumed name of J.H. Parker, and that's where he killed himself on Wednesday, March 27, 1929. The proprietor of the hotel found his body. Sanford had used a razor blade to slash his wrists and his neck and had bled to death several hours earlier. Sanford was known for his humorous pieces. "The Scarlet Night," his first story for Weird Tales, would seem out of place for him, for it is terribly violent and bloody. But in the story, the murderer uses a razor to slash the throat of one of his victims.
Like Dave Scannon in "The Basket," Sanford died in a hotel room far from home. And like the unnamed protagonist in "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die," he set out to kill himself after having hidden his identity and checking into a place of lodging. Life sometimes follows art. Maybe sometimes death does, too.
William Sanford's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Scarlet Night" (Mar. 1923)
"Hootch" (May 1923)
"Grisley's Reception" (Apr. 1925)
"The Midnight Visitor" (Sept. 1925)
"Midnight Realism" (Nov. 1925)
Further Reading
William Sanford's Story:
"The Scarlet Night" is a short short story told in the first person by a man imprisoned for murder. He gives his account of what he has done and what has befallen him. Again there is marital infidelity. Again there is murder. Again we have a prison story. One difference between this and other stories of its kind in the first issue of Weird Tales is that there is a Poesque element in the middle of it, though it is very brief. It's also frightening and gets to the mental state of the narrator. Call this episode one in which there is an altered state of consciousness. Another things that's different about this story is that there is some pretty gruesome violence. That was probably under the influence of Poe as well. Poe's stories "The Premature Burial" and "The Murders on the Rue Morgue" appear to have been Sanford's sources or inspiration. Then again, maybe the episodes in "The Scarlet Night" grew out of his own mind and his own mental state at the time.
I believe Sanford's story includes the first direct reference to Prohibition in Weird Tales. The first-person narrator is a heavy drinker.* There is real fury and violence bottled up inside him, and it explodes when his wife asks him for a divorce so that she can marry a Dr. Langley. He essentially blacks out, or has a hallucination or a psychotic episode. You get a sense in reading Sanford's description of the violence that this was not just a case of the writer's imagination at work. It seems too vivid and too intimate in its understanding for that. And then you read the lone surviving account of the author's suicide and you begin to see.
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*Sanford's second story for Weird Tales is called "Hootch." It appeared in the May 1923 issue, but is so short that it didn't even make the table of contents. (Look on page 91.) It's more or less a fictional filler and may be the shortest of all stories published in the initial run of the magazine, 1923 to 1954. This story, too, is about murder, but it's all just a dream, brought about by the narrator's imbibing the hootch of the title.
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| An illustration of Anne Hutchinson by Howard Pyle, 1901. |
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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