Weird Tales at the End of the Year

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It's a happy day, for even if we have cold, gray days following this one, they will be longer and longer with each one that passes. It's no wonder that this became a season of holidays. Hanukkah has passed, but Christmas is still ahead of us. I want to wish everyone the Happiest and Most Blessed Christmas and a Very Happy New Year. We all need these things.

* * *

I had planned to write more on the first year of Weird Tales before 2023 came to an end, but I have run out of time this year and I'll have to pick up again next. One short series will be on anniversary issues of Weird Tales. In October, I ordered my copy of the 100th anniversary issue directly from the Weird Tales website. My plan was to write about these issues during the month of December. I ran out of time of course, but I also haven't received my copy. I guess Weird Tales is back to its old habits. Maybe next year. I'm also planning to write about another cover artist, as well as the most valuable players in that first year. I also discovered some interesting authors of 1923 whom I haven't covered yet. I would like to write about them, too. So come back. There will be more.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part Three

Here's another long one, but just remember: we're going back billions of years here.

* * *

Primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup have become accepted terms and accepted concepts, even though they describe something that no one has ever observed in nature nor created or recreated in a laboratory. Like the ether of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concepts are based on lots of assumptions, furthermore in the absence of any evidence or any real knowledge regarding a persistent and nagging scientific problem. In the case of ether, the problem involved the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. In the case of primordial ooze, the problem has to do with the origins of life on earth. Nobody of a scientific mind seems to question the idea that life here originated in ooze. A belief in its existence would appear dogmatic.

So what are the origins of ooze? Well, the earliest use of the expression "primordial ooze" that I have found in American newspapers is from November 9, 1899, in reference to Sir John Murray's explorations of the ocean floor on board the HMS Challenger. (Sir John Murray, 1841-1914.) The article I found (in the first of its many appearances in stateside papers) is "Floor of the Sea" in the Washington, D.C., Beacon. In its original, the article was in the London Spectator and was written by F.T. Bullen. Bullen's article treats "primordial ooze" as if knowledge of the concept was common. Evidently, even in 1899, it had been around for a while. Murray is considered the father of oceanography. He has an octopus named after him, Cirrothauma murrayi, thus he has connections both to cephalopods and slime. If you're an oceanographer, you'll have that.

The earliest occurrence of "primordial slime" that I have found is in a review of a scientific article called "Bathybius and the Moneres" [sic] by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in Popular Science Monthly, October 1877. The review, entitled simply "Periodicals," is in the Boston Evening Transcript, October 4, 1877, page 6. In it, reference is made to Haeckel's discovery of a "peculiar slimy substance" on the Mediterranean seafloor. Haeckel called this substance Bathybius or "The Primordial Slime of the Sea Depths." It was supposed to have been a substance that was giving rise, even in contemporary times, to life.

Mention of "Bathybius and the Moneres" leads to the article itself, entitled "Bathybius and the Moners." (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, but even in Haeckel's article, "moneres" is the spelling used.) In that article, there is more talk of slime, ooze, Bathybius-ooze, and even amoebas. There is also an organism called Vampyrella, though I doubt it's the one with which we're familiar. Again, check the spelling.

The concept of Bathybius was older even than Haeckel's article. The stuff was supposed to have been brought up from the ocean floor during the deep-sea soundings made for the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1857. (Remember that part.) In 1868-1870, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Haeckel went back and forth in some excitement to claim that Bathybius: a) was a type of protoplasm; b) covered the ocean floor; c) was constantly coming into being; and d) was a link between life and non-life. Scientists on board the Challenger blew lots of really big, Fearless Fosdick-sized holes in those claims. Huxley admitted his error in 1879. A poem in Punch from 1879 (see below) poked fun at the concept of Bathybius. Yet there were still people who believed in it or at least failed to question it.

To wit:

The earliest reference to "primordial soup" in an American newspaper that I have found is, surprisingly, from 1960. And guess who referred to it? Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) of Yerkes Observatory, that's who! In "Life on Jupiter, Astronomer Says" (Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1960, page 11), journalist Tom Riley wrote of how Dr. Sagan had "suggested that a process of organic synthesis is going on over Jupiter's surface in much the same way as the primordial soup of earth evolved millions of years ago." Dr. Sagan famously said later that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So where was the proof of organic synthesis, either on Jupiter or on the primordial earth? To paraphrase a well-known bandito: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! When it comes to the abiogenesis of life, the message is clear: We have faith! No evidence is needed!

By the way, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and so maybe we have a line of descent for the concept of primordial ooze, from Huxley and Haeckel to Wells . . . thence to Anthony M. Rud? And from him, to lots of other creators of slime creatures, ooze monsters, and things that arise from muck, mire, and the swamplands of the earth? I can't say for sure, but I'm getting ahead of myself in any case.

In his article of October 1877, Ernst Haeckel wrote:

With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation--namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

At last (I think) we have arrived at the origins of ooze. And they are evidently in the work of another German, a natural philosopher called Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who wrote, in 1805:

[A]ll organic beings originate from and consist of vesicles or cells. These vesicles, when singly detached and regarded in their original process of production, are the infusorial mass or protoplasma (urschleim) whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved.

So, in the beginning there was urschleim, the first slime, the slime that is life and from which all life arises in the form of cells of protoplasm, which bind themselves to each other to form ever-higher forms through some unexplained process of genesis and evolution. And now here we are: we came out of slime, we are made of slime, and each of us carries within him or her an ocean floor, a tidal pool, a warm little pond, a swamp.

Thirteen years after Oken wrote came these words:

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. 

They're from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

* * *

From Oken to Huxley and Haeckel to H.G. Wells, ooze, blobs, jellies, and slime found their home in the oceans, either on the ocean floor or in tidal pools. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud is set in the piney woods and swamplands of southern Alabama. In his account of what happened at Cranmer's lodge, Rud's narrator uses ooze and similar words to refer mostly to the remnants of the scientist's giant amoeba, which perished in the enclosure that he had constructed for it after it had eaten his son, daughter-in-law, and manservant. Those remnants now lie in a disgusting, fishy-smelling residue over the grounds. But at least once, that narrator also seems to use ooze in reference to the substrate of the surrounding swampland. So, questions arise:

• Was Rud aware of the concept of primordial ooze or primordial slime as a putative source of life on earth?

• Did he move primordial ooze or primordial slime from the oceans onto land, specifically to the swamplands of the American South?

• If so, was he the first to do so? In other words, was Rud's giant amoeba the first science-fictional, weird-fictional, or pseudo-scientific swamp monster--that is, a monster that arises from the swamp--in American popular culture?

We should be clear here that Cranmer's giant amoeba didn't make itself. It did not arise spontaneously from swamp-ooze. Instead, the author Rud replaced spontaneous generation with a pseudo-scientific or science-fictional process: the amoeba was created by a super-scientist in his laboratory using rearrangement of its chromosomes.

Cranmer didn't mean to do what he had done. "Mine is the crime of presumption," he wrote in his final notebook entry. He aimed too high and because of that fell far. His science was Frankensteinian, but he was not like Dr. Frankenstein. Rud's narrator writes that John Corliss Cranmer "believed in both God and humankind." In fact it was not he, the scientist, who brought on disaster but his son, the writer, who did it. The father understood fully the danger posed by the amoeba. He instructed his son to destroy it. The son, though, was more ambitious, and more than a little foolish. He believed at some level that nature can be controlled. There is a phenomenon in the world of today of sons who lack the moral, physical, and intellectual development of their fathers. We see that all of the time. It may be an irreversible trend. The loss of the first of John Corliss Cranmer's twin beliefs might be the best explanation for that.

One more convention appears in "Ooze," that of the widowed scientist, only this one has a beautiful daughter-in-law rather than daughter. This isn't exactly hopeful science fiction though--in this case it's more like fateful weird fiction--and so they all die.

* * *

"In the womb of the world," an illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" drawn by William Heath Robinson; from A Song of the English (1909). That looks like ooze to me.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a near contemporary of H.G. Wells. It's safe to say that Kipling was an entirely different kind of man and artist than was Wells. Like Wells and the men who preceded him, Kipling knew about ooze and slime and the deep sea except that he wrote about these things from a nonscientific viewpoint rather than a scientific one. I don't want to sound like Garrison Keillor, but here's a poem for today by Kipling:

"The Deep-Sea Cables" (1896)
By Rudyard Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

"The wrecks dissolve above us," by Robinson.

Here's another:

"In the Matter of One Compass" (1892)
By Rudyard Kipling

WHEN, foot to wheel and back to wind,
The helmsman dare not look behind,
But hears beyond his compass-light,
The blind bow thunder through the night,
And, like a harpstring ere it snaps,
The rigging sing beneath the caps;
  Above the shriek of storm in sail
    Or rattle of the blocks blown free,
  Set for the peace beyond the gale,
    This song the Needle sings the Sea:

Oh, drunken Wave! Oh, driving Cloud!
  Rage of the Deep and sterile Rain,
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

When leagued about the 'wildered boat
The rainbow Jellies fill and float,
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The Starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The Sea-egg ripples down the rock,
An orange wonder dimly guessed
From darkness where the Cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride,
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost Ships
Let down through darkness to their lips--
Safe-swung above the glassy death,
Hear what the constant Needle saith:

Oh, lisping Reef! Oh, listless Cloud,
  In slumber on a pulseless main!
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

E'en so through Tropic and through Trade,
  Awed by the shadow of new skies,
As we shall watch old planets fade
  And mark the stranger stars arise,
So, surely, back through Sun and Cloud,
  So, surely, from the outward main
By Love recalled, by God allowed,
  Shall we return--return again!
  Yea, we return--return again!

The first poem is easier for me to understand than the second, but both have imagery of the ocean and its benthic regions: ooze, slime, jellies, cuttlefish, "the blind white Sea-snake," and so on. If we consider one or both of these poems to be genre works, then we have some early examples of ooze and slime in such works.

To be continued . . .

Cirrothauma murrayi, an octopus named for Sir John Murray.

Finally, "Bathybius," a poem from Punch, reprinted in British newspapers in 1879.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part Two

The scientist in "Ooze," named John Corliss Cranmer, was drawn to the swamplands of southern Alabama because of the protozoa that live there. These were the subjects of his scientific research, the result being his unwitting development of a giant and ravenous amoeba, one that ultimately devoured him and his household. (1, 2) Anthony Rud's narrator has his opinion of the place that drew Cranmer. He refers to "the stinking depths of that sinister swamp."

There are lots of oozy and gluey words in "Ooze": viscid, gluey mire, mud, effluvium, scum, slimy, sticky, and of course ooze. There are other words, too, words related to or that might be used to describe colloids: agar, amorphous, rubbery, translucent, glistening, protoplasm. The word colloid dates from the 1850s. It refers to substances that are gelatinous or sticky and glue-like. The study of colloids dates from around the same time, the 1840s to the 1860s. On a related matter, synthetic rubber and plastics are polymers. The study and development of these synthetic polymers dates from the 1800s as well. The discovery of DNA came later, but DNA is also a polymer. It's the true staff of life, twisted around itself like tentacles or a pair of snakes, and it's what Cranmer would have had to manipulate, I think, in order to make his amoeba grow. Maybe we should consider Cranmer's amoeba a genetically modified organism or GMO. Those can be bad for your health, especially when they have great, engulfing pseudopodia.

Protoplasm is colloidal. Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, describes the stuff: "Protoplasm is physically translucent, granular[,] slimy, semifluid or viscous." Living things, then, are related to slime, or, in Rud's story, ooze. If you're a scientist, a biologist like John Corliss Cranmer, you're drawn to slime and ooze as sources of life and as the substance of life. One can become the other. One is the other. Or so some have thought.

In 1922, Alexander Oparin (1894-1980), a Soviet biochemist, began speculating on the origins of life. (3) In 1924, he proposed the prior existence of what people still call "the primordial soup," the place or conditions in which life on earth is supposed to have begun. For some reason, this idea still has credence, even though it relies essentially on a prescientific idea debunked by science, namely spontaneous generation. It's also not scientific in that it has not been and cannot be observed in nature nor replicated in the laboratory. And yet we're supposed to accept it as fact, the alternative of course being an intolerable affront to our beliefs in our own greatness and the smallness of all other things. We should remember in all of this that Oparin was a follower of Marxism, which is, among other things, a pseudoscience, as well as a supporter or associate of Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), who peddled his own brand of pseudoscience, which had (little) to do with heredity and genetics.

Anyway, if you're looking for slime and ooze and to play games with life, swamps and bogs are places for you. You might also like Charles Darwin's "warm little pond," an expression that comes from a letter he wrote in 1871. (Lee Cranmer keeps his "pet" in a warm little pond next to his father's lodge.) Or, if you're like a nineteenth-century scientist or novelist looking for cephalopods as your subject matter, you might go to the ocean in search of ooze. But if you're a pulp-fiction writer from the 1920s, especially one who admires a certain British author of science fiction stories, how exactly might you get there? You might start by reading H.G. Wells' tome The Outline of History, published in 1920.

In Wells' vast survey, history begins with primordial ooze, with "the soft jellies and simple beginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas." After a while, Wells reduced these creatures to shorthand as "[t]he first jelly-like beginnings of life." I think the implication here is not jellyfish-like, but colloidal. And I think the suggestion is just what Darwin had suggested decades before and what Oparin proposed a few years later: that life arose spontaneously from non-life in the warm, shallow waters of a primordial earth, essentially acting as first cause and creating itself. Again, we should remember that Oparin was a Marxist, thus a materialist and officially an atheist; Wells was a socialist, thus also a materialist, possibly an outright atheist; and Darwin was, well, a Darwinist.

Jellies are colloids, as are Oparin's coacervates. The so-called primordial soup, the thing that both gave rise to and became life, might also be called primordial ooze, as I've done here, or primordial slime. In his Outline, Wells mentioned "that microscopic blob of living matter the Amœba." And so we have a category: slime, blobs, jellies, and ooze. (4) Oparin didn't originate the idea of the primordial ooze, however, nor did Wells or even Darwin. If you want the ur-source of slime, you have to go back, I think, to a German-Romantic philosopher of the nineteenth century.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) There's something missing in Rud's description of Cranmer's methods, but that's because there was something missing in our scientific knowledge at the time, namely our knowledge and understanding of DNA.
(2) You could say that Cranmer was involved in gain-of-function research and that the deaths at his lodge were the results of a lab leak, but that would make you a conspiracy theorist, a racist xenophobe, a science denier, a domestic terrorist, and possibly an insurrectionist, so don't do it.
(3) He had the perfect name for a biochemist: it sounds like the name of a protein, or a drug you see on TV: "Ask your doctor about Oparin."
(4) On the website Dark Worlds Quarterly, author G.W. Thomas has assembled a dozen comic book stories from 1940 to 1956, all involving jellies, slime, and ooze. One of these is "The Swamp Horror," from Beware #15 (May 1953). As Mr. Thomas notes, "The Swamp Horror" is very similar to "Ooze." I have seen only what he has posted, but what he has posted shows enough. It looks very much as though the story, written by Richard Kahn and drawn by Harry Harrison (later of science fiction fame), is a conscious adaptation of "Ooze."

"The Swamp Horror" was published in May 1953, just two short months after "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan had appeared in Weird Tales. If we back up a little to give the author time to write his script and the artist time to draw his story, also for the printer to print the book and the publisher to issue it, we might as well call the two stories contemporaneous with each other. Brennan and the Kahn/Harrison team seem to have arrived at the same idea at the same time. But were they from the same source? Did Brennan read or know of "Ooze"? Whatever the case may be, you can see what G.W. Thomas has written and the images he has assembled in his excellent article "Plant Monsters of the Golden Age: Slime Monsters!" from December 23, 2021, by clicking here.

Before "The Swamp Horror" in Beware #15 (May 1953), there was this cover of Beware #13, from January 1953. At first I thought we had our stories and issues mixed up: this looks like it could be an illustration of "The Swamp Horror" from two months later. Instead it illustrates a story called "Rebirth." More to the point, it looks like it could illustrate "Ooze," from Weird Tales, March 1923. The theme is the same and the cover, by Harry Harrison, has all of the elements of Richard R. Epperly's cover from thirty years before, although they are rearranged, like the chromosomes of a giant amoeba. (Harrison did the interior art for "Rebirth" as well.) So maybe "Ooze" was on the minds of the men who created Beware comic books. By the way, Vincent Napoli also had a story in this issue of Beware. He was also an illustrator for Weird Tales, including for the reprinting of "Ooze" in the issue of January 1952.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part One

If it had not been the cover story in that first issue of Weird Tales, Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze" might now be forgotten. Instead, it was reprinted in the expanded and enhanced edition of The Weird Tales Story (2021) and is now available as an ebook. It has also been the subject of recent commentary, analysis, and criticism.

A century separates us from "Ooze." The world from which it came is gone forever. What do we know--what can we know?--of its origins or the context in which it written? Only a little? Or maybe a lot? If we follow some lines of inquiry--if we investigate today in the same way Rud's narrator investigated the events at that ruined house on the edge of Moccasin Swamp--maybe we can discover more about the origins of "Ooze."

"Ooze" would seem to have been something fairly new in its time, a work of science fiction before that genre was so named. Remember that Weird Tales was the first American magazine devoted to stories of fantasy. In March 1923, Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, was still three years in the future, while the term science fiction would have to wait until near the end of the decade before it appeared. Although "Ooze" wasn't the first science fiction story to appear in an American magazine, we can call it the first to appear in Weird Tales. That's easy enough.

"Ooze" is more than just an early science fiction story, however. It's also an implicitly self-conscious story. It knows what it is, and because of that, it might also be called metafictional. (1) The first-person narrator in "Ooze" comments on his missing friend:

As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--[the] pseudo-scientific story.

He proceeds to define the pseudo-scientific story:

In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, or what-not, which carries to logical conclusion improved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

(That's a curious expression: "nadirs of fact." It makes me think of Charles Fort.)

In the paragraph that follows, the narrator mentions Jules Verne and "an Englishman named Wells" as authors of the pseudo-scientific story, observing:

In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility.

(Remember that Charles Fort also called his clippings "data.")

I have said before that the artist is the canary in the coal mine of culture. Rud seems to have been saying the same kind of thing here.

It's no wonder that "Ooze" was the first cover story in Weird Tales, for here within a work of fiction rather than in any editorial or literary manifesto (such as in "Why Weird Tales?" from a year later) is a definition and a guide to the reader as to just what this is all about. It's a kind of announcement: in this magazine, you will read stories of a certain type, stories based on extrapolations of what we know about the physical universe. Significantly, Rud included anthropology in his short list of fields of inquiry: now the doors are thrown open to the human-inhabited universe as well.

The phrase "weird tales" appears in "Ooze." It is applied to stories told by locals about what they call "Daid House," Cranmer's mysteriously ruined backwoods lodge. If "Ooze" is metafictional in one way, it might be in another, too, for it is a science-fiction story told about weird-fictional events, using some of the conventions of weird fiction. The narrator solves the mystery at Dead House by conducting a series of interviews. In other words, using a scientific or journalistic approach, he gathers a series of weird tales about weird events that took place in a weird-fictional setting, involving a super-scientist and his son, a writer of pseudo-scientific stories, the result being an early science-fiction story published in a magazine called Weird Tales.

Again, "Ooze" is self-conscious. It seems to have served as a simultaneous statement of purpose and an introduction, welcome, and guide to readers. So, did Rud write "Ooze" specifically for publication in Weird Tales? Maybe. Maybe not. His narrator's investigations take place in 1913, a full decade before that first issue was published. Rud was still a student in 1913. He was also a budding teller of tales. We know from his first letter in "The Eyrie" that he wrote "A Square of Canvas" while he was still in college. Maybe "Ooze" dates from that period as well. On the other hand, we know from Katherine Hopkins Chapman's article that he spent the winter and spring of 1921 in Citronelle, Alabama, where he had gathered material for at least a couple of stories. So maybe we can say that "Ooze" is from about 1921-1922. Anyway, we can speculate that Rud functioned as a kind of literary agent for writers or as a kind of talent scout for Weird Tales. He seems to have been, at the very least, a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. Whether he just lucked onto Weird Tales--and it lucked onto him--or the magazine actually sought him out, with "Ooze" as a result, Anthony M. Rud played his part in the early success of "The Unique Magazine," such as it was.

Science fiction wasn't fully formed when the first issue of Weird Tales arrived, but neither was weird fiction. Although it has its weird-fictional elements, "Ooze" is more nearly science-fictional than weird-fictional. In his story, Rud referred to Verne and Wells. Absent by name are authors such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, whom we recognize as among the originators of weird fiction. (We should always remember the anonymous authors of Beowulf, too.) Both wrote what we might call proto-science fiction, but both might better be characterized as Gothic and Romantic authors, as authors who told tales of passion, vengeance, and the extremities of emotion, of irrationality, horror, terror, and madness. On the other hand, what is "Ooze" but just another instance of Frankensteinian science? Of an overweening pride in science and reason rather than an understanding of human frailty and the workings of human nature as the determiners of our fate?

It seems clear to me that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells--especially Wells--were Anthony Rud's models in writing "Ooze." Rud was, after all, trained in science and medicine, just as Wells had been. "Ooze" is an account by a first-person narrator of investigations carried out in a pretty even scientific or journalistic manner. The first-person narrator in The War of the Worlds is also, for example, a writer. (2) Wells' seminal works of science fiction were less than thirty years old when Rud wrote. Most were published in the same decade in which Rud was born. By the time Rud was a teenager--in other words, after his Golden Age of Twelve had passed--Wells had moved on. Rud's narrator in "Ooze" doesn't like that very much, commenting that, although Wells wrote pseudo-scientific stories for a time, he abandoned them "for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type."

So I think that the origins of "Ooze" can be traced to the works of H.G. Wells, but I would also go back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818, and to other Gothic and Romantic tales of passion and madness, Moby Dick for example. (3) There's reason to believe that the origins of "Ooze" preceded even Frankenstein, though. And thereby hangs a tale of a scientific--more accurately a pseudoscientific--controversy from so long ago that no one now remembers it.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) I'm not the first to use the term metafictional in reference to "Ooze." See "American Weird" by Roger Luckhurst in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015).
(2) In the Mercury Theatre adaptation of 1938, the narrators are a number of reporters and--in the voice of Orson Welles--a surviving scientist. Thirty years later, WKBW Radio of Buffalo, New York, broadcast a second adaptation of Wells' story in which, again, radio reporters narrate the Martian invasion of Earth. 
(3) The second English edition of Frankenstein, with Mary Shelley's byline, was published in 1823, making this year its bicentenary.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)-The First Cover Story

Chicago native Anthony Melville Rud wrote the first cover story in Weird Tales, "Ooze," published in March 1923. Born on January 11, 1893, he was the son of two medical doctors. Rud studied medicine, too, but he gave that up to go into the fiction-writing business. From 1918 to his death on November 30, 1942, he authored scores of stories for pulp magazines in many of the most popular genres, including detective stories, adventure stories, Westerns, and fantasy, what we would call science fiction, science fantasy, and/or weird fiction. I'll let the author's profile below tell you more about his career. You can also read what I have written about him before in three parts:

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part One" from February 3, 2016

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part Two from February 4, 2016

• "Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)" from February 5, 2016

I find now that what I wrote seven years ago is incomplete. I'll fix part of that below.

Eight out of nine of Rud's first published stories are about a detective called Jigger Masters. I have never read these stories but would like to. I can speculate that Rud had connections to a real-life Chicago police detective named John O'Keefe, who investigated the murder of Mildred Allison Rexroat, subject of my two-part series on the Tango Dancer Murder. Rud was connected only briefly and very peripherally to that case. I'll have more on O'Keefe, a fellow Irishman, just in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Anthony M. Rud wrote Westerns under the pen name Anson Piper, his mother's maiden name. He also wrote under the name R. Anthony and apparently under the name Ray McGillivray. In addition to writing the first cover story in Weird Tales, Rud wrote the first letter published in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column that also began in March 1923. He had just one more letter after that, a very brief one in the second issue, April 1923. Following are his complete credits in "The Unique Magazine." All are under the byline Anthony M. Rud unless otherwise noted:

Anthony M. Rud, Ray McGillivray, and R. Anthony's Stories & Letters in Weird Tales

• "Ooze" (Mar. 1923; reprinted Jan. 1952; reprinted Summer 1983)-The first issue
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Mar. 1923)-The first letter in the first issue
• "A Square of Canvas" (Apr. 1923; reprinted Sept. 1951)-The second issue
• "The Forty Jars" as by Ray McGillivray (Apr. 1923)
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Parasitic Hand" as by R. Anthony (Nov. 1926; reprinted Aug. 1934)
• "The Endocrine Monster" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1927)
• "The Witch-Baiter" as by R. Anthony (Dec. 1927)
• "The Spectral Lover" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1928)
• "The Place of Hairy Death" (Feb. 1934)
• "Bellowing Bamboo" (May 1934)

So it looks as though Rud, after helping to get Weird Tales started in 1923, made two returns, first as R. Anthony in 1926-1928, then as himself in 1934.

Weird Tales in Alabama

Anthony Rud opened his first letter in "The Eyrie" with these words:

Dear Mr. Baird: Delighted to hear that you contemplate WEIRD TALES. I hope you put it through--and without compromise.

I take it that Rud and Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, were in touch before the magazine even began and that Baird sought him out as a potential contributor. Remember that Rud was a Chicago native and that Weird Tales was more or less based in Chicago, even if its editorial offices were in Indianapolis at the time. Remember, too, that Jacob Clark Henneberger, the co-publisher of the magazine, had cast about for Chicago authors (namely Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht) to help fill the pages of his planned magazine. Henneberger didn't get those men, but at least he got Rud. In his letter, Rud offered a story he had written in his college days, "A Square of Canvas," which appeared in the second issue of "The Unique Magazine," April 1923. If Ray McGillivray was indeed one of his pen names, then Rud had a third story in those first two issues.

"I am buried deep in the heart of the piney woods," Rud wrote, "35 miles from the nearest news-stand selling even a Sunday paper, and I want to make sure of seeing each issue of WEIRD TALES." Evidently, Weird Tales found its way even into remote places in the South, and Rud helped spread the word, writing:

     It's a corking title [Weird Tales], and it will get all the boosting I can give. Herewith a clipping of my last platform appearance. I told 'em of the coming magazine, and that it offered a field of reading unique. At Atlanta and Montgomery, where I speak later in the winter, I'll give the sheet a hand. I have two more dates in Mobile, and I'll mention your project.

So Rud was a public speaker in the South, working out of a base in "the piney woods" of southern Alabama. (I'll have more evidence of that in a minute.) He must have written sometime in late 1922 or early 1923, so in those few months before the first issue appeared, Rud was spreading the word in Alabama and Georgia about a new and unique magazine on its way. I don't know what kind of public speaking he did, but in his travels Rud may very well have come in contact with other writers. His story "Ooze" is set in southern Alabama, presumably near Mobile. His narrator even mentions a "reporter on the staff of The Mobile Register." I have written before about Weird Tales in Alabama (on Dec. 18, 2022, here). It looks as though most of the authors I included in that summary worked on newspapers in Birmingham, well north of Mobile. Nonetheless, Artemus Calloway, who also worked on newspapers in Birmingham, contributed to the second issue of Weird Tales, April 1923.

I have an item from The Bookman, October 1921, page 186, regarding writers in Alabama. Katherine Hopkins Chapman wrote:

     The little town of Citronelle, Alabama, is rich in literary traditions. [. . .] Two miles south of this spot is the famous estate locally known as "Mann's Folly," built by Charles Mann, brother of Colonel William D'Alton Mann, late editor of "Town Topics." A quarter section of woodland was laid out in a chain of Italian lakes and rare shrubs and trees imported to beautify the grounds. [. . .] A handsome house was started, but when it was half completed, Charles Mann, who was said to have taken a flier on 'change, went broke. [. . .] [T]he estate, neglected and forlorn, is referred to by the townspeople as "Mann's Folly."

Colonel William D'Alton Mann was at one time the owner of the Mobile Register.

Katherine Hopkins Chapman continued:

     Other interesting, if less spectacular writer folk come and go at Citronelle. Anthony M. Rud, magazine and fiction writer ("Saturday Evening Post" et al.), after spending the winter and spring there, drove through to Chicago for the summer--and so far as the thermometer counts, had better stayed south! While in this section Mr. Rud found much to interest him in the way of story material. One of the scenes of his forthcoming tales, he states, will be laid between Citronelle and Vinegar Bend, while another will be just this side of Mobile. He found the negro character rich in story suggestion and will use it to a large extent.

"Ooze" is of course set in Alabama, and now maybe we have a place: Citronelle or its environs. (Citronelle is about thirty-four miles from Mobile. Vinegar Bend is north of Citronelle. Oak Grove, which lies between Citronelle and Mobile, is mentioned in "Ooze" as a source for lumber.) "Ooze" begins with a description of a ruined house in the swampy backwoods of southern Alabama. And there is a description of a nasty, fish-smelling pond of ooze on the grounds of the house. Could Rud--except for the ooze--have been describing Mann's Folly?

Anthony  M. Rud's story:

"Ooze" is a novelette in nine chapters, told in the first person by a writer out of the Chicago area, "a scribbler of general fact articles." It is told in the form of an investigation after-the-fact of terrible and murderous events that happened at a now ruined house in backwoods Alabama, not far from Mobile. The year is 1913, six years after the events under investigation.

The main characters in "Ooze" are--or were--Lee Cranmer, a writer of what is called "pseudo-scientific" stories, his wife Peggy Breede Cranmer, and Cranmer's father, scientist John Corliss Cranmer. The narrator knew all three and was a friend and college roommate of Lee Cranmer. He is dismayed to know that the elder Cranmer had been accused of murdering his son and daughter-in-law. Declared insane and confined to a mental institution, John Corliss Cranmer escaped and went missing. By the end of the story, the narrator discovers the truth behind the mystery. (The couple of Lee Cranmer, teller of tales, and his father, a scientist, is more or less equivalent to the couple of Rud, the pulp writer, and his father, the medical doctor.)

The subject of Cranmer's scientific research was protozoa and the possibility of altering their "chromosome arrangement" to affect change in their size and growth. The mysteries are manifold: Just what was Cranmer up to in his researches? What happened to him, his son, and his daughter-in-law? (There was another victim, too, the octoroon man Joe, who, according to a witness, was engulfed by "a slimy, amorphous something.") How did Cranmer's house, called "the Lodge" or "the Dead House," come to ruination? And what was Lee Cranmer's "pet" kept in the now oozy pond surrounded by the breached, doorless, brick wall, which also enclosed the house? Rud's unnamed narrator answers all of these questions in the course of his investigations. The story ends with an all-revealing quote drawn from a notebook, another one of those conventions of weird fiction.

"Ooze" is an early science fiction story, but it lacks the positive and progressive aspects of science fiction. The theme of science run amuck (no pun intended) and a resulting horrible fate visited upon the protagonists is more nearly weird-fictional, as is the remote setting, the physical isolation, and the prevailing atmosphere of decay. Rud's narrator is a writer of fact, not fiction, and his tone is pretty even and matter-of-fact. There isn't any of the overwrought narration so common in weird fiction. Descriptions of the monster, a giant amoeba, and what it does are effective and horrifying. We don't need any Lovecraftian prose to see that.

"Ooze" is a somewhat jumbled story, but this is in the nature of investigations done after-the-fact. The investigator discovers pieces of information on events not in the order of their occurrence but in the order that he finds them. He then has to piece it all together. Readers of Weird Tales in March 1923 would have read a story like this one before, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story of scientific hubris and overreach. They would read another even more like it afterwards, in "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales in February 1928, for in Lovecraft's story there is a similar investigation and a piecing together of separated events. I don't have any direct evidence that Lovecraft was influenced by reading "Ooze." But the similarities are there, including a scene in "The Call of Cthulhu" set in a southern swamp. We also shouldn't rule out that Joseph Payne Brennan was influenced by "Ooze" in his writing of "Slime," published in Weird Tales thirty years later, in March 1953.

From the New York Daily News, August 6, 1933, page 107. I have colorized this image.

Revised slightly on September 29, 2024.
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970)-The First Author, The First Story

Willard E. Hawkins was born on September 27, 1887, in Fairplay, Colorado. He was an author, editor, publisher, and public speaker with stories in Amazing Stories, Astounding Science-Fiction, The Blue Book Magazine, Breezy Stories, The Cavalier, Chicago Ledger, Fantastic Adventures, The Green Book Magazine, Imagination, The Red Book Magazine, Science Fiction, Super Science Novels, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Western Outlaws, Western Rangers, and Western Trails. Hawkins also worked as an editor with the Loveland Reporter (at age nineteen), Denver Times, Rocky Mountain News, Rocky Mountain Hotel Bulletin, and American Greeter.

Hawkins established The Student Writer magazine in 1916. He was also an editor, with David Raffelock, of The Author and Journalist, which may have been an outgrowth of The Student Writer. Among those who read and benefitted from The Author and Journalist was Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), later creator of Perry Mason. Hawkins died on April 17, 1970, presumably in Craig, Colorado. The current National Writers Association is descended from The Writers Colony in the Rocky Mountains, founded by Raffelock in 1929.

According to a newspaper article from 1924, Hawkins and Raffelock conducted "a simplified training course in short story writing, that has hundreds of students all over America enrolled." (1) That leads me to think that the new Weird Tales magazine was in touch with editors, authors, and instructors in short-story writing in different parts of the country, and that it derived some of its early content from young people, students, and budding authors through those connections. There is reason to believe that Anthony M. Rud was a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. (I'll have more on that soon.) Maybe Willard E. Hawkins served the same kind of function for writers in Colorado.

I have already written about Hawkins. You can read what I posted on November 11, 2014, by clicking here. He had just one story in Weird Tales. As it so happens, his was the first to appear in "The Unique Magazine." It was first printed in March 1923, one hundred years ago this month. "The Dead Man's Tale" was reprinted in Weird Tales in July 1934 under the heading "Weird Story Reprint."

Willard E. Hawkins' Story:

In the table of contents in that first issue of Weird Tales, "The Dead Man's Tale" is called a novelette. There are eight brief chapters, plus an introduction explaining that the narrative to follow was discovered in the papers of a Dr. John Pedric, "psychical investigator and author of occult works." So, we have the first occult or psychic detective in Weird Tales and the first occurrence of a very commonly used element in weird fiction, the framing device that attempts to lend some kind of credence to the framed story.

"The Dead Man's Tale" is exactly that: it is a tale told in the first person by a soldier who was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne, July 24, 1918. So here was another first: "The Dead Man's Tale" was the first story in Weird Tales involving what was then known as the Great War, a war that had ended less than five years before the magazine began. We should always keep in mind just how immediate was World War I during those early days of Weird Tales.

"The Dead Man's Tale" is a ghost story, a life-after-death story, a story of one soldier's attempt in his hatred to frag another before that was even a term. The dead soldier works on the man he has taken as his enemy like Iago on Othello. Eventually he possesses his body. What is the reason behind his efforts? As the French say, cherchez la femme. In actuality, though, it is his own madness and cruelty and lust that drives him to these things. We read this story now and the suggestion of what we call post-traumatic stress disorder, what men then called shell shock, arises. That gives Hawkins' tale an interesting angle that readers of 1923 might have missed. "The Dead Man's Tale" is otherwise, in my opinion, an unpleasant account of a murderous insanity, something like a story by Edgar Allan Poe but lacking in the fineness and skill of Poe's writing. The dead man's redeeming action at the end of the story is hardly redemptive for the trouble he has caused.

By the way, "The Dead Man's Tale" includes the first mention of (more accurately the first allusion to) a work of weird fiction occurring in a story published in Weird Tales. That story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), was actually Hawkins' inspiration in writing his own story for Weird Tales. He explained as much in his letter to "The Eyrie," also published in the first issue of the magazine, on page 181.

Here's another by-the-way: there is a minor character named Hawkins in "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales just five years after that first issue, in February 1928.

Note
(1) From "Short Story Writers," Fort Collins Coloradoan, February 20, 1924, page 4.

Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970)
(I have recolored this picture, green for envy.)

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales-The First Issue

The first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923, probably arrived on newsstands before that, possibly in mid to late February. (According to the website of the current Weird Tales, the date was February 18, 1923.) I base that only on the idea that magazines usually showed up ahead of their cover dates so as to avoid seeming outdated. For example, Time magazine also started in March 1923. Beginning as a weekly, the first issue was dated March 3. According to Wikipedia--which knows lots of true things but lots of untrue things, too--it was actually put out on February 24.

Indianapolis and Chicago were two likely places for Weird Tales to have made its debut. We can wonder now who were the first buyers of the magazine and how far afield it went. Did "The Unique Magazine" make it as far west as California? As far south as Florida? As far east as Maine? Maybe the early letters columns will let us know. I'm planning to look at "The Eyrie," as the regular letters column was called, for clues about the early days of Weird Tales. Not long ago, I wondered about tellers of weird tales in Alabama and how they might have become connected to the main offices in the Midwest. After reading the first letter published in Weird Tales, I have an idea.

The first issue of Weird Tales was just 6 inches by 9 inches, more or less an octavo-sized volume. Inside, it was numbered Volume 1, Number 1. The cover price was 25 cents, and a yearly subscription was $3. Richard R. Epperly's cover was the only illustration in that March issue, which included 192 numbered pages of stories, fillers, editorial content, and advertisements. The first advertisement to appear in Weird Tales told readers "Get Ready for Big Pay Job" by becoming an "Electrical Expert." Chicago Engineering Works would tell them how to do it.

There are twenty-two short stories, three novelettes, and the first part of a two-part serial in Weird Tales number one. The short stories are called "remarkable," the novelettes "unusual," and the serial "a strange novel in two parts." There are also some nonfiction fillers, the author or authors of which were uncredited. All but one of the stories has the author's name or byline attached to it. Anonymous made his and her first appearance in the first issue of the magazine. There weren't any poems included in the contents. Those would have to wait.

I said that there weren't any illustrations in Weird Tales number one. That may not be entirely true. There are decorations to be sure, but decorations aren't illustrations. Their purpose is to fill space or to break up space or text with simple graphics. There is a map, though, the first map to appear in the magazine, though almost certainly not the first map in a pulp magazine or in a work of fantasy fiction. That map is in Hamilton Craigie's novelette "The Chain," on page 83.

Following are the contents of Weird Tales, March 1923, adapted from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

• "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins (short story)
• "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (novelette)
• "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline (serial, part one of two)
• "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman (short story)
• "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson (short story)
• "Hark! The Rattle!" by Joel Townsley Rogers (short story)
• "The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine (short story)
• "The Ghoul and the Corpse" by G.A. Wells (short story)
• "Fear" by David R. Solomon (short story)
• "The Chain" by Hamilton Craigie (short story)
• "The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor (short story)
• "The Closing Hand" by Farnsworth Wright (short story)
• "The Unknown Beast" by Howard Ellis Davis (short story)
• "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham (short story)
• "The Accusing Voice" by Meredith Davis (novelette)
• "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story (short story)
• "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes (short story)
• "Queer Tribes of Savages Found in Africa" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "African Brides Must Be Plump" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "Nimba, the Cave Girl" by R.T.M. Scott (short story)
• "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" by ? ? ? [Anonymous] (short story)
• "The Scarlet Night" by William Sanford (short story)
• "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding (short story)
• "Ten Pallbearers for This Mammoth Woman" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The Return of Paul Slavsky" Captain George Warburton Lewis (short story)
• "Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The House of Death" by F. Georgia Stroup (short story)
• "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The Gallows" by I.W.D. Peters (short story)
• "The Skull" by Harold Ward (short story)
• "The Ape-Man" by James B. M. Clark, Jr. (short story)
• "The Eyrie" including an essay by The Editor

My plan is to go through these stories one by one, to write about them and their authors, and to point out firsts and other interesting facts about each. I'll begin with Willard E. Hawkins.

A self-promotional advertisement from Weird Tales, March 1923, page 4, evidence from the beginning that weird fiction crosses genres. 

Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for the compiled contents of Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Richard R. Epperly (1891-1973)-The First Cover Artist

Commercial Artist, Illustrator, Fine Artist, Portraitist, Landscapist, Art Instructor

Born March 21, 1891, Tallula, Illinois

Died December 3, 1973, Oak Park, Illinois

Richard Ruh Epperly, the first cover artist for Weird Tales magazine, was born on March 21, 1891, in Tallula, Illinois. (Some sources give his birth year as 1890.) His parents were Charles Tazewell Epperly, a grocer, and May (Ruh) Epperly. Tallula is a little more than twenty miles from Springfield, Illinois. In his life as an artist, Epperly had his connections to Abraham Lincoln country. These included a portrait that he made of the Great Emancipator and an art exhibition held in the 1940s in the home of Mary Todd Lincoln's sister.

According to Find A Grave, Epperly "first became interested in art when, as a boy, he picked up a correspondence course in art discarded by his brother." He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1911 to 1914 and graduated with honors. Epperly served in the U.S. Army from May 28, 1918, to May 27, 1919, attaining the rank of corporal. He was stationed in Liverpool, England, and in France. While in France, he visited the Louvre Museum and became "determined to return some day to study."

From 1919 to 1928 or 1929, Epperly worked as a commercial artist in Chicago. When he filled out his draft card in 1919, he was working for Lammers-Shilling Company, a large Chicago firm. It was during this period that Epperly provided cover illustrations for the March 1923 issues of Weird Tales and Detective Tales. Those may have been his only works in the pulp fiction field.

In 1929, Epperly returned to Paris to study at the Académie Moderne under André Lhote (1885-1962) and André Marchand (1877-1951). The Académie Moderne was a free art school that had been founded in 1924 by Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966).

By 1930, Epperly was back in Chicago and working again as a commercial artist. He had married Cosona or Corona Edith Kleckner on June 2, 1920, in Cook County, Illinois, presumably in Chicago. The Epperlys had a child together, but by the time he was enumerated in the 1930 census--with his wife's family--he was a widower. He married again on April 9, 1936, also in Cook County. His new wife was Rose Verniere (1903-1987), an Italian-American. They also had a child together. An interesting tidbit from the lives of Richard and Rose Epperly: They embarked for Naples, Italy, on June 12, 1956, in New York City. Their ship was the SS Andrea Doria. On a return trip to New York on July 25, 1956, the Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger liner Stockholm. It sank the next day. Fortunately, most of the passengers and crew were rescued. I don't know whether the Epperlys were on the ship when it was struck. I suspect they weren't.

In 1940, Epperly was still in Chicago, but in 1941, he relocated to Oak Park, Illinois, just outside the city. He lived in Oak Park for the rest of his life and was a well-known and active member of the art scene in the Chicago area. His work was in the All Illinois Society of the Fine Arts exhibition in Chicago in 1938, where he won an award for best watercolor by an Illinois-born veteran. He was a member and a board member of the Austin, Oak Park and River Forest Art League. He also taught art with the league and in 1973 received its President's Award.

Epperly was also a member of the Springfield Art Association and had twenty canvases in a two-man show at the home of the sister of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1946. In the 1940s, he traveled and painted in Colorado, Wyoming, California, New Mexico, and other places in the West. He exhibited at the Palette and Chisel Academy in Chicago in 1947; the Austin, Oak Park and River Forest Art League exhibition in 1960; and at the Oak Park National Bank in 1961. His work is in private collections, as well as in the collections of the Springfield Art Association, the Union League Club of Chicago, the Chicago Athletic Club, the Rotary Club of Australia, and at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. He painted portraits of Abraham Lincoln; Pope John XXIII; Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, Mrs. Romulo, and their sons; and Percy L. Julian, among others.

Richard R. Epperly died on December 3, 1973, in Oak Park and was buried at Elm Lawn Memorial Park in Elmhurst, Illinois. He was eighty-two years old.

Richard R. Epperly's Cover Illustration for Weird Tales

March 1923--The First Issue of "The Unique Magazine"

Further Reading

There are entries on Richard R. Epperly on the websites AskArt, Find A Grave, and Worthpoint.

Flamenco Dancer, a nicely made portrait by Epperly. This has a classic 1920s-1930s look. It could easily have made the cover of a popular magazine. The color scheme is about the same as on the first-issue cover of Weird Tales.

Street Scene, Paris, circa 1930, probably more like 1929, if it was painted from life.

The Lammers-Shilling Company building in Chicago, presumably where Epperly worked for at least some time during 1919-1928 or 1929. I wonder if the editor or publisher of Weird Tales could have approached the Lammers-Shilling Company with a job, and that job was then assigned to Epperly, or if Epperly's covers for Weird Tales and Detective Tales were freelance work. As the old commercial says, the world may never know.

Epperly's portrait of Abraham Lincoln, after a photograph by Mathew Brady, published in the Picture Section of the Chicago Sunday Tribune on February 10, 1952. I have recolored this picture from a halftone image of the original.

Finally, Epperly's portrait of American chemist Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975), from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, a gift of Eugene V. Epperly, son of the artist. I have reproduced this image here under the doctrine of fair use. Though born in Alabama, Dr. Julian earned his degree and worked at  DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. I'm proud to call him a fellow Hoosier. He was the first black American to earn a doctorate in chemistry and, in 1950, the first black resident, with his family, of Oak Park, Illinois. Richard R. Epperly's portrait of his fellow townsman is a fine and sensitive one. His technique is smooth and accomplished. And to think that Epperly once drew a picture of a giant amoeba with its pseudopodia wrapped around a pulp-fiction heroine . . .

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley