Marietta Hawley (1836-1926)

Pseudonym of Marietta Holley

Aka "Josiah Allen's Wife"

Poet, Author, Humorist, Music Teacher

Born July 16, 1836, near Adams, Jefferson County, New York

Died March 1, 1926, near Pierrepont Manor, Jefferson County, New York

I have pored through the list of writers who contributed to Weird Tales, and I thought I had found all of its writers of the nineteenth century. Now another turns up. I guess this is why it's called research.

The November 1927 issue of Weird Tales closed with a long poem called "The Haunted Mansion" by Marietta Hawley. That name would probably not have been familiar to the magazine's readers, for it was an old pseudonym of an author who had died the year before at age eighty-nine. Her poem would not have been familiar, either, for it was already six decades old, having originally appeared in 1867 in Peterson's Magazine as "The Haunted Castle." The author's real name, Marietta Holley, would likely have been unknown as well. And perhaps only a few readers would have remembered her nom de plume, "Josiah Allen's Wife." Nonetheless, at one time, Marietta Holley was one of the most popular writers in America.

Marietta Holley was born on July 16, 1836, near the town of Adams in Jefferson County, New York. Called "the female Mark Twain," she was younger than old Sam Clemens by just eight months. Like him and other American humorists of the nineteenth century ("Josh Billings," "Petroleum V. Nasby"), Marietta Holley used a pseudonym in her popular writings. She began as "Marietta Hawley," a poet, but with the publication of My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's (1872), she became known as "Josiah Allen's Wife." Over the next four decades, Marietta Holley wrote more than two dozen books. Ten were in her very popular "Samantha" series, Samantha being Mrs. Josiah Allen and the narrator of the books.

The New York Times called the Samantha series "beloved" by readers of the 1880s through the early 1900s, yet Marietta was little remembered even late in her own lifetime. My library is small, but I have not found her in The Popular Book by James D. Hart (1950) or The Popular American Novel, 1865-1920 by Herbert F. Smith (1980). Nor have I found her in American Humor by Constance Rourke (1931), The Rise and Fall of American Humor by Jesse Bier (1968), or The Comic Spirit in America edited by John K. Massey (1969). Then I looked in the book Laughing Their Way: Women's Humor in America by Martha Bensley Bruère and Mary Ritter Beard (1934), and there she was--though only briefly (and, incidentally, in a section called "Feminists"). The point of all this is that the writings of Marietta Holley, so popular in their day, quickly passed from memory after her death. Kate H. Winter has helped to revive the memory of "Josiah Allen's Wife" in Marietta Holley: Life with "Josiah Allen's Wife", originally published in 1984 and more recently in a paperback edition.

Marietta Holley died on March 1, 1926, thus she lived into the Weird Tales era, though not long enough to see her poem published in the November 1927 issue. That poem, again, originally entitled "The Haunted Castle," was reprinted in Weird Tales as "The Haunted Mansion." I can't say why. In any case, here it is in its entirety.

The Haunted Castle

by Marietta Holley
(reprinted in Weird Tales as "The Haunted Mansion")

It stands alone on a haunted shore,

With curious words of deathless lore

On its massive gate impearled;

And its carefully guarded mystic key

Locks in its silent mystery

From the seeking eyes of the world.

Oft do its stately walls repeat

Echoes of music wildly sweet

Swelling to gladness high-- 

With mournful ballads of ancient time,

And funeral hymns--and a nursery rhyme

Dying away in a sigh.

Pictures out of each haunted room,

Up through the ghostly shadows loom,

And gleam with a spectral light;

Pictures lit with a radiant glow,

And some that image such desolate woe

That, weeping, you turn from the sight.

Shining like stars in the twilight gloom

Brows as white as a lily's bloom

Gleam from its lattice and door;

And voices soft as a seraph's note,

Through its mysterious chambers float

Back from eternity's shore.

In the mournful silence of midnight air

You hear on its stately and winding stair

The echoes of fairy feet.

Gentle footsteps that lightly fall

Through the enchanted castle hall,

And up in the golden street.

And still in a dark forsaken tower,

Crowned with a withered cypress flower,

Is a bowed head turned away;

A face like carved marble white,

Sweet eyes drooping away from the light,

Shunning the eye of day.

And oft when the light burns low and dim

A haggard form ungainly and grim

Unbidden enters the door;

With chiding eyes whose burning light

You fain would bury in darkness and night,

Never to meet you more.

Mysteries strange its still walls keep,

Strange are the forms that through it sweep-- 

Walking by night and by day.

But evermore will the castle hall

Echo their footsteps' phantom fall,

Till its walls shall crumble away.

"Josiah Allen's Wife"--Marietta Hawley (1836-1926).

Update with a photograph on June 3, 2023.

Original text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Muriel Campbell Dyar (1875-1963)

Author
Born December 31, 1875, Marietta, Ohio
Died November 21, 1963, San Diego City, California

Muriel Campbell Dyar was born on the day before the nation's centennial year began, on December 31, 1875, in Marietta, Ohio. Granddaughter of a professor and daughter of an oilman, she graduated from her hometown Marietta College in 1897. A 1905 directory of alumni listed her as engaged in "Literary Work" in Beverly, Ohio, a Muskingum River town north of Marietta. The 1910 census found her across the river in Waterford and living with her sister-in-law. Muriel's occupation was listed as "Writer for Magazine." That situation repeated itself ten years later when Muriel was counted this time with her brother-in-law in Downers Grove, Illinois. He was a banker, while she continued to write for magazines. By 1930, she had arrived on the West Coast and was residing with her cousin. Muriel Campbell Dyar had by then moved up to being an "authoress" of novels and stories.

The Fiction Mags Index has listed Muriel C. Dyar's stories, but that list (below) is incomplete, including as it does credits only from the period 1899 to 1912. She was also the author of a book, Davie and Elizabeth, Wonderful Adventures (1908).

• "The Woman in Red" The Black Cat (Nov. 1899)
• "Unmasked" The Black Cat (Mar. 1900)
• "Benje's Eulogy" Harper’s Monthly (Aug. 1903)
• "Elizabeth and David" Harper's Monthly (Sept. 1904)
• "The Story of a Great Week" Harper’s Monthly (Mar. 1905)
• "The Beau" Harper's Monthly (Feb. 1906)
• "The Valedictory" Harper's Monthly (Mar. 1907)
• "The Last Visit to a Scholar" Harper's Monthly (Apr. 1907)
• "Old 'Lijah Bale's Escape" Harper's Monthly (June 1907)
• "Johnny Hall" Harper's Monthly (July 1907)
• "The Tea-Party" Harper's Monthly (Jan. 1908)
• "The Mother Bird" Harper's Monthly (Apr. 1908)
• "The Oversight" Harper's Monthly (June 1908)
• "The Man of Destiny" Harper's Monthly (Nov. 1908)
• "In the Other Room" Harper's Monthly (Mar. 1909)
• "Resignation" Harper's Monthly (July 1909)
• "Sleepyhead" Harper's Monthly (Sept. 1909)
• "On the Bird-Cage Road" Harper's Monthly (June 1910)
• "The Crime in Jedidiah Peeble's House" Harper's (Mar. 1912)

As you can guess, Muriel must have submitted her story "The Woman in Red" to The Black Cat not long after graduating college. In his introduction from Weird Tales (Summer 1973), Sam Moskowitz described the reaction to "The Woman in Red":

So tantalizing was the ending of this provocatively imaginative story that hundreds of letters poured in [to The Black Cat] asking for a sequel and big red letters across the top of the March, 1900 number presented it reading: "The Woman in Red--Unmasked!"

Weird Tales reprinted the story and its sequel in the first issue of its revived version in the summer of 1973. By then, Muriel Campbell Dyar had been gone a decade, having died the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Her place of death was San Diego, California. Before that she had lived in El Cajon.

Muriel Campbell Dyar's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Woman in Red" (Summer 1973, originally in The Black Cat, Nov. 1899)

"Unmasked" (Summer 1973, originally in The Black Cat, Mar. 1900)

Further Reading
Muriel Campbell Dyar is briefly listed in Ohio Authors and Their Books, 1796-1950 (1962), edited by William Coyle.

Muriel Campbell Dyar was a prolific and popular author, yet I could find only one image relating to her life and work. It's this illustration by W.H.D. Koerner (1878-1938) for her story "Ann Eliza Weatherby's Trip to Town" from Harper's Monthly Magazine (1916). 

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952)

Short Story Writer, Novelist, Reviewer, Poet, Essayist, Biographer
Born September 25, 1871, New York, New York
Died December 10, 1952, Danbury, Connecticut

Born on September 25, 1871, in New York City, Hildegarde Hawthorne was the daughter and granddaughter of well-known writers. Like her father, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), and her grandfather, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Hildegarde Hawthorne wrote of strange and supernatural events, and like Nathaniel Hawthorne, she was published in Weird Tales long after her death. Her lone story for the magazine was "Perdita," originally in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1897, anthologized in Shapes That Haunt the Dusk in 1907, and reprinted in Weird Tales in Summer 1973.

Hildegarde Hawthorne began selling articles to the children's magazine St. Nicholas at age sixteen. During her long and productive career, she wrote many works for children. She also conducted the book review column for St. Nicholas and contributed to the New York Times and New York Tribune. Her last published work was an article for Reader's Digest.

Hildegarde penned numerous biographies, including one of her famous grandfather, based on letters, family stories, and other sources close to home. She also wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne's well known contemporaries, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. I can offer only a partial list of her books:

• Born to Adventure: Fremont (1900)
• The Lure of the Garden (1911)
• Girls in Bookland (1916)
• Rambles in Old College Towns (1917)
• The Secret of Rancho del Sol (1931)
• Island Farm (1934)
• The Happy Autocrat: A Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1936)
• On the Golden Trail (1936) illustrated by Sanford Tousey
• The Poet of Craigie House: The Story of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1936)
• Romantic Rebel: The Story of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1936)
• Youth's Captain: The Story of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1936)
• Runaway (1941)
• Williamsburg, Old and New (1941)
• California's Missions: Their Romance and Beauty (1943)
• Matthew Fontaine Maury, Trail Maker of the Seas (1944)
• His Country Was the World (1949)
• Concord's Happy Rebel: Henry David Thoreau
• Long Adventure: The Story of Winston Churchill
• No Road Too Long
• Old Seaport Towns of New England
• Peeps at Great Cities: New York
• Rising Thunder: The Story of Jack Jouett of Virginia
• Romantic Cities of California
• Tabitha of Lonely House
• Westward the Course: A Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Her ghost stories were collected in a volume entitled The Faded Garden in 1985. I'm afraid I don't know its contents.

Hildegarde Hawthorne married John Milton Oskison on July 16, 1920, and moved to California. Later she lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and passed away in nearby Danbury on December 10, 1952, at age eighty-one.

A Song

By Hildegarde Hawthorne

SING me a sweet, low song of night

  Before the moon is risen,

A song that tells of the stars’ delight

  Escaped from day’s bright prison,

A song that croons with the cricket’s voice,

  That sleeps with the shadowed trees,

A song that shall bid my heart rejoice

  At its tender mysteries!

And then when the song is ended, love,

  Bend down your head unto me,

Whisper the word that was born above

  Ere the moon had swayed the sea;

Ere the oldest star began to shine,

  Or the farthest sun to burn,—

The oldest of words, O heart of mine,

  Yet newest, and sweet to learn.

Hildegarde Hawthorne's Story in Weird Tales
"Perdita" (Summer 1973, originally in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Mar. 1897)

William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden assembled this collection, Shapes That Haunt the Dusk, for publication in 1907. Hildegarde Hawthorne's "Perdita" is among its contents.

Here's an illustration from Girls in Bookland (1916). The artist was John Woolcott Adams.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Wardon Allan Curtis (1867-1940)

Aka Warden Allan Curtis
Journalist, Author
Born February 1, 1867, New Mexico Territory
Died January 20, 1940, Plymouth, New Hampshire

Wardon Allan Curtis was born in the New Mexico Territory on the first day of February, 1867. He was the son of Captain Charles Albert Curtis, U.S.A., and Harriet Louise Hughes Curtis. I suspect that he was born on or near a military installation. He may have moved from place to place as a child as military children do. In 1889, Curtis received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin. He worked as a journalist after that and was with the Chicago Daily News in 1910-1913, the Boston Herald in 1913-1916, and the Manchester Union in 1924-1928. Curtis also served as secretary of the Publicity Commission of New Hampshire in 1921-1925. From at least 1899 onward, Wardon Allan Curtis wrote science fiction and fantasy stories. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995) writes:

His most important sf [i.e., science fiction] is a short story about a brain transplant, "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie" (1899 The Windsor Magazine), in which the brain is human and the recipient body that of a prehistoric survival from a bottomless lake that may lead into a hollow earth.

If that description doesn't make you want to read the story, I don't know what will.

The Black Cat published his story "The Fate of the 'Senegambian Queen'" in 1900. Weird Tales reprinted the story in its Fall 1973 issue. An Arabian Nights kind of story, "The Seal of Solomon the Great," appeared in The Argosy in February 1901. Almost two decades later, All-Story Weekly printed his tale "The Mahoosalem Boys" (May 15, 1920). All other credits for Curtis as listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database are from his 1903 collection The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton, "a mixture of Oriental fantasy and bizarre mystery," according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Wardon Allan Curtis lived in New Hampshire late in life and died in Plymouth twelve days before his seventy-third birthday. He was buried in Green Grove Cemetery in Ashland, New Hampshire.

Wardon Allan Curtis' Story in Weird Tales

"The Fate of the 'Senegambian Queen'" (Fall 1973, originally in The Black Cat, Nov. 1900)

An illustration by Stanley L. Wood (1866-1928) for Wardon Allan Curtis' story "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie" from 1899, demonstrating the connection between science fiction and cryptozoology. A story like this one would later have been included in that hybrid genre known as weird western. The Valley of Gwangi (1969) was a later entry in that selfsame genre.

Curtis wrote a series of interrelated tales in The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton (1903). My first question upon seeing this cover illustration: "Just what are they smoking?"

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Cleveland Moffett (1863-1926)

Journalist, Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer, Translator
Born April 27, 1863, Boonville, New York
Died October 14, 1926, Paris, France

Cleveland Langston Moffett was born on April 27, 1863, in Boonville, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1883 and worked on the staff of the New York Herald, first in Europe (1887-1891), then in New York (1891-1892). Moffett followed that assignment with work for the New York Recorder from 1893 to 1894 and thereafter with various magazines. He returned to the Herald as Sunday editor in 1908-1909.

Moffett was a prolific and versatile writer. His books include Real Detective Stories (1898), Careers of Danger and Daring (1901), A King in Rags (1907), The Battle (1909), The Hand of Mystery (1913), The Conquest of America (1916), and Possessed (1919). He also wrote a number of prose poems and plays. Although Cleveland Moffett is almost unknown today, his story, "The Mysterious Card," and its sequel, "The Mysterious Card Unveiled" (both from 1896), generated a sensation among readers of the early story magazine The Black Cat. The pair was reprinted in a small hardbound edition in 1913 and in Weird Tales in 1973. (1)

In strong contrast to his role as a muckraker, Cleveland Moffett was also a fantasist. His novel The Conquest of America is a future-war story, a genre of great popularity from the 1870s onward. The "Mysterious Card" stories also contained fantastic elements, as did Possessed, a novel of the supernatural. Moffett also predicted the invention of color television in a story called "Seeing by Wire" (1899).

Although he lived into the Weird Tales era, Moffett went unpublished in the magazine until 1973. It's interesting to note that the companion magazine to Weird Tales, called Detective Tales (later Real Detective Tales), bore a title very similar to that of Moffett's first book, Real Detective Stories. That could be intentional or merely coincidental.

I would like to quote the New York Times on a curious item from the resume of Cleveland Moffett:

He was a trustee of the American Defense Society, and in the first months after the United States entered the World War, he was Chairman of the American Defense Vigilantes and a leader in the suppression of seditious street orators. (2)

The Times chronicled Moffett's continuing attempts to shout down or shut up soap box orators during the war. It's interesting that a newspaperman and author would attempt to suppress free speech, but then the president at the time, a former college professor, was engaged in the same kind of activity. In any case, Cleveland Moffett returned to Europe after the war and spent the last year and a half of his life there. He died in Paris on October 14, 1926. He was sixty-three years old.

Cleveland Moffett's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Mysterious Card" (Winter 1973, originally in The Black Cat, Feb. 1896)
"The Mysterious Card Unveiled" (Winter 1973, originally in The Black Cat, Aug. 1896)

Notes
(1) Once again, Sam Moskowitz had problems with proper nouns: in his introduction to "The Mysterious Card," Moskowitz called the sequel "The Mysterious Card Revealed," while the actual title is given as "The Mysterious Card Unveiled." The latter appears to have been the true title of Moffett's tale.
(2) From his obituary, October 16, 1926, page 17.

Cleveland Moffett caused a sensation with his puzzle-story "The Mysterious Card," which first appeared in this issue of the magazine The Black Cat in February 1896. That was the same year in which the pulp magazine was born.

Before the TV show Dirty Jobs, there was Moffett's book Careers of Danger and Daring (1901).  I apologize for the poor image, but at least it will give you an idea of the ground Moffett covered in his book.

Finally, a more recent cover of The Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, a book by Moffett's grandson, also named Cleveland Moffett. See the comment below and thanks to Mr. Moffett for the correction. (I don't know the name of the cover artist.)

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937)

Photographer, Author, Biographer, Poet
Born July 10, 1861, New Bedford, Massachusetts
Died April 9, 1937, New Smyrna, Florida

Albert Bigelow Paine, biographer of Thomas Nast, Mark Twain, Lillian Gish, and Joan of Arc, was born on July 10, 1861, in the old whaling city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a child, he lived far from the sea in Bentonsport, Iowa, and Xenia, Illinois. He learned photography in St. Louis, worked as an itinerant photographer in the South for three years, and dealt in photographic supplies in Fort Scott, Kansas. After receiving an encouraging letter from Richard Harding Davis, editor of Harper's Weekly, for a story Paine had submitted to the magazine, Paine returned to the East. He became a full-time writer and would remain in the East and in Europe for most of the next forty years.

Paine wrote novels (The Bread Line [1900], The Great White Way [1901]), travel books (The Car That Went Abroad, The Ship Dwellers, The Tent Dwellers), and children's books (series on The Arkansaw Bear and The Hollow Tree). He also authored skits, sketches, verse, humorous pieces, and of course works of fantasy. Paine was most well known for his biographies, the first being Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures (1904). On the strength of that book, Paine was selected by Mark Twain to be his biographer. Paine lived and traveled with Mark Twain for four years and completed a three-volume biography, plus three other shorter biographies and a collection of Twain's letters. Paine also wrote biographies of Lillian Gish, Captain Bill MacDonald of the Texas Rangers, and New York banker George F. Baker. Paine's two biographies of Joan of Arc earned him the title Chevalier in the Légion d'honneur from the French government. Paine also served on the Pulitzer Prize committee for many years.

Albert Bigelow Paine appears to have been the originator of the phrase "the great white way," though not as applied to Broadway. Paine used the phrase instead for his novel of a Utopian lost world located in the Antarctic. Paine also wrote a fantasy called The Mystery of Evelin Delorme: A Hypnotic Story, published in 1894. His lone story published in Weird Tales came in Sam Moskowitz's 1973-1974 revival of the magazine. It's entitled "The Black Hands," and it concerns a white man who--through a train wreck--becomes "as black a negro who walks the earth to-day!" Paine's story was a remarkable treatment of race in the age of Jim Crow and came a full fifty years before integration and the civil rights movement in America.

Albert Bigelow Paine died on April 9, 1937, in New Smyrna, Florida. He was seventy-five years old.

Albert Bigelow Paine's Story in Weird Tales

"The Black Hands" (Summer 1973, originally in Pearson's Magazine, Aug. 1903)

Search for Albert Bigelow Paine on the Internet, and you will likely come up with results in two categories: Mark Twain and children's books. There's no shortage of information on Twain, so I thought I would show some of Paine's storybooks for children.

Text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

W.C. Morrow (1854-1923)

Writer, Journalist, Playwright, Teacher

Born July 7, 1854, Selma, Alabama

Died April 3, 1923, Ojai, California

San Francisco must have been crawling with writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many wrote stories of strange and supernatural events. Others are known to students of mainstream literature. Chief among them were Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), Bret Harte (1836-1902), Frank Norris (1870-1902), and Jack London (1876-1916). Others included Joaquin Miller (1837-1913), Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909), Edwin Markham (1852-1940), Gelett Burgess (1866-1951), and of course Emma Frances Dawson (ca. 1839-1926), about whom I wrote a few days ago. The list could go on and on, but if you go too much further, you will have to include W.C. Morrow, a teller of weird tales with a reputation out of proportion to his literary output.

William Chambers Morrow was born on July 7, 1854, in Selma, Alabama, son of a slaveholder. The Civil War and Reconstruction put an end to that of course. In 1870, when the census enumerator found them, Morrow's father and mother were keeping a hotel with their sixteen-year-old son in residence. Morrow graduated from Howard College (now Samford University) at age fifteen and moved to California in 1879. There he submitted stories to The Argonaut and the San Francisco Examiner. Morrow's first book, Blood-Money, was published in 1882. His other works included A Strange Confession (newspaper serial, 1880-1881), The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897), The Art of Writing for Publication (pamphlet, 1899), A Man: His Mark: A Romance (1900), Lentala of the South Seas (1908), and Over an Absinthe Bottle (pamphlet, 1936). I suspect Bierce would have appreciated the off-kilter and slightly cynical titles.

W.C. Morrow wrote only a few stories. Nevertheless, he is a much admired author. Alice Entwistle, a contemporary and a fellow Californian, wrote in 1900 that he "holds a distinguished place among the short-story writers of the time." Sam Moskowitz echoed her words in 1973:

Morrow, purely on the basis of the stories in The Ape, The Idiot and Other People, ranks with Poe, Hawthorne, Bierce, Chambers, and Crawford as one of the truly great American masters of the horror story. 

Charles Caldwell Dobie claimed Morrow as "a master of the imagination, properly controlled by a lucid style." Weird Tales reprinted several of Morrow's stories, four during the Farnsworth Wright era and one in Moskowitz's version of 1973-1974. The editor Wright was also a San Franciscan. I wonder if he could have known the men and women who helped make his home city a literary hub. Morrow's stories have also been anthologized in Argonaut Stories (1906), 33 Sardonics edited by Tiffany Thayer (1946), and Horror Times Ten (1967).

Suffering from ill health, W.C. Morrow repaired to Ojai, California. He died there a few weeks later, on April 3, 1923, a month after Weird Tales made its debut. He was sixty-eight years old.

W.C. Morrow's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Monster-Maker" (Dec. 1928)

"His Unconquerable Enemy" (Aug. 1929)

"The Permanent Stiletto" (Aug. 1930)

"Over an Absinthe Bottle" (Apr. 1933)

"The Haunted Burglar" (Summer 1974)

An advertisement for The Ape, The Idiot and Other People by W.C. Morrow (1897), created by Anna Whelan Betts (1873-1959).

The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897). Image courtesy of John Lehner.

A Man: His Mark: A Romance (1900). Image courtesy of John Lehner. 

Lentala of the South Seas (1908), illustrated by the Western artist Maynard Dixon (1875-1946). Image courtesy of John Lehner.

One of Dixon's interior illustrations for Lentala of the South Seas. Image courtesy of John Lehner.

"His Unconquerable Enemy" appeared in the paperback collection Horror Times Ten, edited by Alden H. Norton (1967). Sam Moskowitz wrote that the story, "will never be forgotten by anyone who reads it." Note the similarity to the cover illustration of Horrors in Hiding from a couple of days ago.

Postscript: Ambrose Bierce mentioned his friend W.C. Morrow in an essay entitled "To Train a Writer" from 1899. Bierce observed that "Mr. W.C. Morrow, the author of 'The Ape, the Idiot and Other People,' a book of admirable stories, is setting up a school to teach the art of writing. If he can teach his pupils to write half as well as he can write himself he may be called successful." (Quoted in Ambrose Bierce, A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (1998).) Nov. 7, 2012.

The remaining five illustrations by Maynard Dixon for Lentala of the South Seas by W.C. Morrow (1908), images provided by John Lehner. Update on January 24, 2015. Thank you, John.

Updated on April 19, 2022.

Thanks to John Lehner for images provided.
Text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Nathaniel T. Babcock (1851-1928)

Nathaniel P. Babcock
Journalist, Editor, Author
Born December 28, 1851, New York, New York
Died February 13, 1928, Zanesville, Ohio

I'll have to begin again with a question of names. In his first issue of a revived Weird Tales, Sam Moskowitz credited one of his authors as "Nathaniel T. Babcock." That credit seems to have come from Munsey's in 1892 and perhaps also from The Argosy in 1896. We now know that the author's real name was Nathaniel P. Babcock. In any case, one of the reasons for doing research is to correct mistakes made by previous researchers. I have received frequent corrections from readers of this blog. Although I haven't made all those corrections yet, I hope to get to them and I hope that you'll continue to send them in.

Nathaniel P. Babcock, by my best guess, was born on December 28, 1851, in New York City. (1) He may have been related to an old and prominent New England family named Babcock, but I have been unable to confirm that. H.P. Lovecraft must have known the Babcock name, for he used it in "A Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936). Lovecraft's own family may have been related to the Babcock family as well through the Whipple line.

Babcock was a newspaperman. His obituary in the New York Times (Feb. 16, 1928, p. 3) states that he had worked in the newspaper business for fifty-three years, first with the New York Tribune, then with the World, the American, and with the Hearst syndicates. His story "The Man with the Brown Beard" was published in Munsey's in January 1892 and in The Argosy in February 1896. That was the story Moskowitz used in Weird Tales. Babcock also contributed to The Century, The Junior Munsey, Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and St. Nicholas Magazine between 1886 and 1903.

Babcock married a woman from Somerset, Ohio. At least one of his children was born in Zanesville. That would explain his connection to the Buckeye State. In February 1928, Babcock returned from Europe with his wife and daughter. Eleven days later, he died in a hospital in Zanesville. He was seventy-six years old.

Forty-five years after that, Sam Moskowitz placed "The Man with the Brown Beard" in his new Weird Tales and in his paperback anthology, Horrors in Hiding. Evidently it had proved elusive: despite the fact that "The Man with the Brown Beard" was the first--chronologically--of the stories listed in the first comprehensive index of fantasy in the Munsey periodicals (2), it had never before been reprinted. Moskowitz corrected the oversight, calling Babcock's story a "powerful tale of horror."

Nathaniel P. Babcock's Story in Weird Tales

"The Man with the Brown Beard" (Summer 1973, originally in The Argosy, Feb. 1896)

Update (Oct. 27, 2020): Reader Ricardo Gouvea asked about other short stories written by Nathaniel P. Babcock. I found a list of his credits on the website The FictionMags Index. I have found a few more credits in other places, so here is an updated list:

• "The Stranger Cat" (poem) in St. Nicholas, Jan. 1886
• "The Queerness of Quelf" (poem) in St. Nicholas, Apr. 1887
• "Silly Miss Unicorn" (poem) in St. Nicholas, July 1887
• "Love’s Dilemma" (poem) in The Century Magazine, Apr. 1888
• "Ruth’s Birthday" (poem) in St. Nicholas, Nov. 1888
• "His Majesty the King" (poem) in St. Nicholas, May 1889
• "The Man with the Brown Beard" (short story) in Munsey’s Magazine, Jan. 1892
• "When Moody and Sankey Stirred the Nation" (article) in Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1897
• "Newspaper Head Lines" (article) in The Junior Munsey, Dec. 1901
• "Without Publicity" (short story) in The Black Cat, June 1902
• "The Cheseboro Heir" (short story) in The Buffalo Times, Oct. 19, 1902
• "My Red Cravat" (short story) in The Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1903
• "The Day in June; or When Teddy Comes Home" (poem) in The Daily Arkansas Gazette, Mar. 31, 1910
• "The Dawn of Effort" (poem) in The Daily Arkansas Gazette, Apr. 26, 1910
• "Casabianca in 1910" (poem) in The San Francisco Examiner, June 28, 1910
• "The Fall of a Poet" (poem) in The Daily Arkansas Gazette, Nov. 19, 1910

Babcock was married to Caroline Maginnis Babcock (1856-1942) a native of Somerset, Ohio, and a member of the Froebel Society, an educational organization in Brooklyn, New York.

Notes

(1) I have seen birthdates of February 1852 and December 1853 as well. If the 1860 census is accurate, then the 1853 birthdate cannot be. Two sources indicate a birthdate in December--two (for December) against one (for February) leaves December 28, 1851, as the most likely date in my mind.

(2) The index, "Fantasy in the Munsey Periodicals" by William H. Evans, was serialized in Fantasy Commentator, a fanzine, in 1946-1947.

Text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Albert Page Mitchell (1852-1927)

Edward Page Mitchell

Journalist, Editor, Short Story Writer

Born March 24, 1852, Bath, Maine

Died January 22, 1927, New London, Connecticut

The first thing to do here is to deal with the problem of names. "Albert Page Mitchell" is the name that appeared on the cover of two issues of the Sam Moskowitz Weird Tales of 1973-1974. That same name serves as a byline on the table of contents and in the interior of the magazine. These two issues of Weird Tales came out at about the same time as a book called The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell, collected and with a biographical perspective by Moskowitz. That biographical perspective, entitled "Lost Giant of American Science Fiction," is a sixty-three page survey of American science fiction of the nineteenth century with a discussion of Mitchell's place therein. Overall, it's an admirable piece of work, but unless I'm missing something, not once is Mitchell referred to as "Albert Page Mitchell." There is mention of Mitchell's cousin, Albert G. Page, but otherwise, the Christian name "Albert" doesn't appear in relationship to the author, and he is referred to in every case either as "Mitchell" or "Edward Page Mitchell." (Moskowitz even calls him once "Edgar Page Mitchell.") So what's going on here? I can think of two possibilities: One, in rediscovering Mitchell, Moskowitz knew he had a scoop and he didn't want anybody to know about it before his book came out. Two, Moskowitz made a colossal mistake, conflating the names "Albert G. Page" and "Edward Page Mitchell" in the magazine Weird Tales. I can't see that Moskowitz would have gained anything by using a false name to protect his privy information. To me Moskowitz's use of the name "Albert" just looks like a blunder. If you do an Internet search on "Albert Page Mitchell," you'll find nothing but references to those two issues of Weird Tales (and an entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database). As far as I can tell, no one before or since has called Mitchell by the name "Albert Page Mitchell."

So Edward Page Mitchell it is.

Mitchell's biography is on Wikipedia. You can read it by clicking on this link. That biography seems to have been based on Moskowitz's own work in The Crystal Man. If Moskowitz is correct, then Mitchell--whom he called "'The Missing Link' in the history of American science fiction"--wrote the earliest known stories or very early stories on the topics of:

• Faster-than-light travel ("The Tachypomp," 1874)
• Teleportation ("The Man Without a Body," 1877)
• Mind transfer ("Exchanging Their Souls," 1877)
• Cybernetics ("The Ablest Man in the World," 1879)
• Cryogenic preservation ("The Senator's Daughter," 1879)
• Surgical alteration of personality ("The Professor's Experiment," 1880)
• An invisible man ("The Crystal Man," 1881)
• A time machine ("The Clock That Went Backward," 1881)
• A friendly alien life form ("The Balloon Tree," 1883)
• A mutated human with superior powers ("Old Squids and Little Speller," 1885)

Mitchell was a journalist; all of his known fiction was first published by his employer, the New York Sun, between 1874 and 1886. (1) Mitchell's first story, entitled "The Tachypomp," appeared in the Sun in January 1874 and again in Scribner's Monthly in April 1874. Concerned with faster-than-light travel in a decidedly non-Einsteinian way, "The Tachypomp" is also notable for its mention of an android and a tunnel through the earth. I'm not sure if Mitchell coined the term tachypomp, but its construction is simple enough: tachy, from the Greek, meaning "swift" or "rapid," and pomp, from the Latin, meaning "procession," also from the Greek, "to send." According to Wikipedia, physicist Gerald Feinberg coined the term tachyon for a hypothetical faster-than-light particle in 1967. Feinberg could not have known that an obscure nineteenth-century American writer had anticipated his construction.

Edward Page Mitchell spanned American science fiction from Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), whom he knew as a young man, to Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929) and Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), whom he met later in life. Mitchell also knew Frank Stockton (1834-1902), Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828-1914). Although he was interested in fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and the occult, Mitchell remained a solid citizen and a family man. He was on the editorial staff of the Sun in 1897 when Virginia O'Hanlon wrote her now famous letter asking if there is a Santa Claus. (2) My reason for bringing this up is not just to make a connection between Mitchell and a famous event. In 1991, Ed Asner played Edward P. Mitchell in a TV movie version of Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus. That would make Mitchell one of only a few Weird Tales authors to have been played in a movie or television show. (3)

Edward Page Mitchell died on January 22, 1927, in New London, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-four. It would take nearly half a century and the work of Sam Moskowitz--despite his mistakes--for him to be recognized as a major figure in American science fiction of the nineteenth century.

Notes

(1) Mitchell, an 1871 graduate of Bowdoin College, didn't begin working for the Sun until October 1875. He worked for newspapers in Maine and in Boston before that. Mitchell remained with the Sun the rest of his career, reaching the post of editor-in-chief in 1903 and retiring in 1922. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain taught at Bowdoin in two stints. His teaching was interrupted by service during the Civil War. He resigned in 1883.

(2) The reply--"Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus"--was written by another editor, Francis Pharcellus Church.

(3) Two others: Robert E. Howard played by Vincent D'Onofrio in The Whole, Wide World (1996), a fine and sympathetic biopic of the creator of Conan the Cimmerian; and H.P. Lovecraft, played by Jeffrey Combs and others in various films.

Edward Page Mitchell's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Balloon Tree" (Winter 1973, originally in the New York Sun, Feb. 25, 1883)
"The Devilish Rat" (Summer 1974, originally in the New York Sun, Jan. 27, 1978)

The Crystal Man, Doubleday Science Fiction from 1973, compiled and with a historical and biographical essay by Sam Moskowitz. The artist is unknown.

I presume this is the same book in a Spanish edition.

Mitchell's work was also translated into Italian. His story, "An Uncommon Sort of Spectre," appeared in this book for youngsters.

Revised slightly and corrected on January 22, 2017; revised slightly on August 9, 2021.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley