Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940)-A Short Short Story

Newspaper Reporter, Soldier, Translator, Author, Editor, Music Critic
Born July 29, 1888, Santa Barbara, California
Died June 12, 1940, Jackson Heights, New York

I have stayed away from writing a biography of Farnsworth Wright. Luckily, I found a source that will allow me to go on avoiding that task. My source is a biographical article in a series called "Titans of Science Fiction," printed in the fanzine Science Fiction Digest, Combined with The Time Traveler, in Volume 1, Number 7, from March 1933. The editor was Maurice Z. Ingher; associate editors were Mortimer Weisinger, Raymond A. Palmer, and Julius Schwartz; and contributing editors were Forrest J. Ackerman and Henry Schalansky. The article itself was written anonymously. Wright may have himself been the author. I found this issue of Science Fiction Digest in a most timely way, on Saturday last week. It's from the collection of Margaret B. Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio. I found it at the same place as her larger collection, much of which I purchased last year.

TITANS OF SCIENCE FICTION

FARNSWORTH WRIGHT

    Editor of Weird Tales since November, 1924, was born in California forty-five years ago. Has English, Scotch, and French blood in him. Lived in San Francisco until 1906 when the earthquake 'threw' him out.

   Was bitten early with the editorial bug. When attending a San Francisco High School, he published an amateur magazine, "The Laurel," which he edited, wrote, and printed himself on a hand press belonging to a friend.

    Was educated at the University of Nevada and the University of Washington. While at the latter he was managing editor of their daily paper. Had to work his way through college. Spent one year surveying, one summer canvassing books, another summer as entomologist for the British Columbia Hop-Company, campaigning against the hop-fleas and the hop-lice.

    When the United State got into the Big Scrap he went to France as a private in the infantry. Was acquainted with French well enough to act as a French interpreter in the A.E.F. for one year.

    Returned to resume life as a newspaper reporter in Chicago. Was the music critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner (the Hearst Morning paper in the Windy City) for two years.

    Wrote stories and read manuscripts for Weird Tales when Edwin Baird was editor from 1923-1924, and later became its editor when the Popular Fiction Publishing Company bought the magazine in 1924.

    He is the author of about 40 stories altogether, but story-writing is merely an avocation with him. Has written but one science fiction story, "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," an uproarious satire on interplanetary stories and science fiction in general. It was reprinted twice: in the Ten Story Book, and again with "The Moon Terror."

    It is rumored that Mr. Wright writes under the nom-de-plume of Francis Hard, whose stories and poems have appeared in Weird Tales and Oriental Stories--but he prefers not to say anything about it.

    His favorite relaxations are chess and swimming, he prefers to read books dealing with science and history. His favorite poet is Keats, favorite story-writer is Alphonse Daudet, but thinks William Morris' "A King' Lesson" is the best short story he's read. Likes to see Mickey Mouse on the screen in preference to anyone else, and considers Master Robert Wright, age three, his favorite hobby.

* * *

It goes on from there, but that's enough for now. "Master Robert Wright," by the way, was Wright's son, Robert Farnsworth Wright (1930-1993). How strange it is to hold a publication from ninety years ago in one's hand, a publication that was new and fresh when a long-dead man was just a three-year-old boy.

"Francis Hard" was in fact a nom-de-plume of Farnsworth Wright. (Hard was his mother's maiden name.) He began using that nom-de-plume only after he had assumed the role of editor of Weird Tales in November 1924. In all, Wright had five stories in Weird Tales from March through November 1923, plus three short stories and five poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine from November 1924 to October 1937. So there was precedent for an editor to use a pseudonym while still having his works printed in Weird Tales. Maybe Lamont Buchanan, later associate editor, availed himself of that practice during the 1940s and '50s.

Farnsworth Wright's Stories in Weird Tales

• "The Closing Hand" (Mar. 1923)
• "The Snake Fiend" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Teak-Wood Shrine" (Sept. 1923)
• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (Oct. 1923; reprinted in The Moon Terror [1923] and in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 [1997])
• "Poisoned" (Nov. 1923)

Stories & Poems by Farnsworth Wright Writing as Francis Hard in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine

• "The Great Panjandrum" in Weird Tales (short story, Nov. 1924)
• "The Dark Pool" in Weird Tales (poem, Apr. 1925)
• "The Death Angel" in Weird Tales (poem, Sept. 1925)
• "Two Crows" in Weird Tales (poem, Jan. 1925)
• "The Evening Star" in Weird Tales (poem, Mar. 1926) 
• "The White Queen" in Oriental Stories (short story, Oct./Nov. 1930)
• "The Picture of Judas" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (short story, Apr. 1933)
• "After Two Nights of the Ear-ache" in Weird Tales (poem, Oct. 1937)

Farnsworth Wright's Story:

"The Closing Hand" is a very short story of only two pages. It takes place in an old house at night, with two sisters lying together in an upstairs bedroom and the younger of them talking about how the place might be haunted. The older sister is more level-headed and proceeds to fall asleep. There are sounds downstairs. The younger sister wakes the older, who goes to investigate. She is gone for too long. A presence comes into the room and . . .

"The Closing Hand" is written more or less at a high school level. It begins as a haunted house story and ends as a simple crime story. It reads like a sequence from a modern horror movie.

In its issue of September 1, 1922, the Chicago Tribune asked the man on the street, "What do you think of Health commissioner's Bundesen's 'public' health plan?" Farnworth Wright, then aged thirty-three, provided this answer.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Wilhelm von Scholz (1874-1969)

Poet, Playwright, Author, Actor, Editor, Narrator, Translator

Born July 15, 1874, Berlin, Germany

Died May 29, 1969, Konstanz, Germany

Sooner or later, if you're writing about historical, cultural, or biographical events of the twentieth century, you will almost certainly have to deal with some unsavory topics, for the last century was one of horrors. Every century has its horrors of course. However, the horrors of all previous centuries are far removed from us, while those of the last hundred years survive. They survive not only in the memories--and in and on the bodies--of people who lived through them, but also in the minds of those who still adhere to the ideologies and philosophies that perpetrated those horrors. Even at this late date, despite abundant evidence that Marxism, communism, Nazism, socialism, Fascism, and their kindred isms are corrupt and murderous failures, the world is full of people who believe that we should march to their drums.

Seventy-four years ago this month, Nazi Germany annexed and occupied its southern neighbor, Austria, in an event known as the Anschluss. In that same month, Weird Tales printed a story called "The Head in the Window," translated and adapted by Roy Temple House from the work of a German writer named Wilhelm von Scholz. Scholz or von Scholz may be unique among contributors to Weird Tales, for the German author was a servant of Nazism.

Born on July 15, 1874, in Berlin, Wilhelm von Scholz was the son of Adolf Heinrich Wilhelm Scholz (1833-1924), later von Scholz and the Secretary for the Treasury of Germany and Minister of Finance for the Kingdom of Prussia. Wilhelm Scholz grew up in Berlin and moved with his father to the family estate, "Schloss Seeheim," in Konstanz in 1890. Scholz graduated high school in 1892 and studied literature, history, and philosophy in Berlin, Lausanne, and Kiel. He received his doctorate from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 1897. Scholz became dramaturge and director of the Stuttgart State Theatre in 1916 and president of the section for poetry of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1928.

I have called Scholz a servant of the Nazis, but I don't know that he was ever a member of the Nazi Party. It would have been hard for him to explain his actions during the Nazi era however. On March 16, 1933, he signed a declaration of loyalty to the German Academy of Literature. In October of that year, he pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler. According to a German Wikipedia article, in 1939 Scholz retracted his previous "philo-Semitic remarks." During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he published a Nazi newspaper in Krakow. Also according to the article, Scholz authored verse glorifying the Führer for an anthology of poetry as late as 1944. Finally, in June 1944, Scholz received an honorary doctorate from the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg and a grant of 30,000 marks from Adolf Hitler. Whether Scholz was compelled to serve the State or whether he was a willing participant in Nazism is a question for another time and place. It may be worth noting that, first, the main body of his work appeared before 1933, and, second, Scholz was nearly sixty when the Nazis came to power. It's also worth noting that large swaths of German society--including writers and of course military men--were required to take oaths of loyalty to Hitler and his regime. Doing so might very well have proved the difference between living and dying. In any case, Scholz's reputation will probably forever be marred by his association with Nazi Germany.

After the war, Scholz served as president and honorary president of the Association of German Playwrights and Composers. I don't have clear details on the remainder of his career, although I know that he received various badges and medals during the 1950s and 1960s. Wilhelm von Scholz died on May 29, 1969, in Konstanz and was buried in his adopted home city. According to a German Wikipedia article, "His poetry is marked by the mystical-occult." In his plays, Scholz followed in the neoclassical tradition of Paul Ernst and Christian Friedrich Hebbel. By the way, the German playwright Karl Friedrich Paul Ernst (1866-1933) should not be confused with the American author Paul Ernst (1899-1985), a prolific teller of weird tales. 

Works by Wilhelm von Scholz

(Titles are freely translated from the German.)

The Losers, 1899

Swapped Souls, 1910

New Poems, 1913

The Lake, 1913

Dangerous Love, 1913

The Jew of Konstanz, 1913

Days of Summer, 1914

The German Narrator, edited by Wilhelm von Scholz, 1915

Ensign of Braunau, 1915

The Lake: A Millennium of German Poetry from Lake Constance, selected by Wilhelm von Scholz, 1915

The Unreal, 1916

German Mystic, 1916

The Poet, 1917

Luck and Fate [?], 1923

Perpetua, 1926

Charlotte Donc, ca. 1928, 1941

The Road to Ilok, 1930
The Duty, 1932

The Poems, Complete Edition, 1944

Wilhelm von Scholz's Story in Weird Tales

"The Head in the Window" translated and adapted by Roy Temple House (Mar. 1938)

Further Reading

I have based my biography almost entirely on a German-language Wikipedia article. This may be the first English-language biography of Scholz on the Internet.

Left to right: Wilhelm von Scholz, Oskar Fried, and Rainer Maria Rilke in a drawing by Emil Orlik, 1896.

An etching in illustration of Scholz's Charlotte Donc (ca. 1928) by Alois Kolb.

A work by Wilhelm von Schulz appeared in this issue of the American-style German magazine Uhu ("Owl"), from March 1932. The magazine was in print from 1924 until 1933. I doubt that it's any coincidence that the end year for publication was the same year in which Adolf Hitler rose to power. (Uhu was published by and named for the publishing house Ullstein. Thanks to Lars Dangel for further information.)

Six years later, Scholz's story, "The Head in the Window," appeared in this issue of Weird Tales. The cover art was by Margaret Brundage.

Revised on March 30, 2023.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Bodo Wildberg (1862-1942)

Pseudonym of Heinrich Ludwig William Gabriel Dickinson

Aka Heino Louis Bodo von Dickinson-Wildberg

Poet, Playwright, Author, Translator, Editor

Born August 7, 1862, Lemberg, Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine)

Died January 31, 1942, Berlin, Germany

Bodo Wildberg was born on August 7, 1862, in the Austrian Empire city of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), a son of British-Austrian aristocracy. His father was Heinrich August Dickinson, Esquire (1822-1866), a major in the Austrian army and a descendant of Edmund Dickinson, a physician and alchemist in the court of King Charles II of England. Wildberg's mother was Maria Theresa, the widowed Baroness von Escher, born Baroness von Hennet and well placed in Prague. Major Dickinson was killed in 1866 in the Battle of Königgrätz during the Austro-Prussian War. Sometime after that and before 1876, his son attended school in Dresden. In 1876, the boy matriculated at the Theresianum in Vienna. Later he studied in Prague. The subjects of his study included law, philosophy, and philology. During his working life and into retirement, Wildberg lived in Teplice-Šanov, Dresden, and Berlin. To compound the loss of his father, Wildberg's son was killed in France during World War I.

Bodo Wildberg is an obscurity, little known even in his own country despite his long career, his sizable output, and his association with the renowned German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). His nickname, Bodo, was once a common name in his native land, especially during the Middle Ages. I don't  know the source of the second half of his pseudonym, Wildberg, although it may have been a surname from his mother's family. Bodo Wildberg's first published works--verse and plays--went into print in the 1880s. The author's first foray into the world of the macabre and supernatural was a collection with a title translated as Death Shoots, which can also be translated as Deadly Instincts and Deadly Urge (1894). Other collections followed: Dark Stories (1910), The Snakeskin and Other Strange Stories (1911), and The Sixth Panther and Other Stories (1912). Wildberg also wrote novels of fantasy and adventure and translated works by Edgar Allan Poe into German. He was known to American readers perhaps only for the stories "The Sixth Panther," published in Young's Magazine in July 1911, and "The Snakeskin Cigar Case," published in Weird Tales in July 1936. According to a German Wikipedia entry, Wildberg's work was mainly in the category of fantasy and is comparable to the work of British writers H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) and John Beresford Davies (1873-1947). A Russian website compares him to Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Rice Burroughs among others. According to reader Lars Dangel, Wildberg was extremely wealthy and unconcerned with material success as an author.

Wildberg died in Berlin on January 31, 1942, at age seventy-nine. What I have read of him sounds very intriguing. I hope that more of his works will someday be translated into English.

Bodo Wildberg's Story in Weird Tales

"The Snakeskin Cigar Case" translated by Roy Temple House (July 1936)

Further Reading

A list of works by and about Bodo Wildberg appears in the German Wikipedia entry on him. You can find it by clicking here.

Author Bodo Wildberg (1862-1942)

The same photograph on the cover of what appears to be a journal or pamphlet an advertising stamp. [See the note below for a correction.] The title "The Sixth Panther" appears below his signature. I hope that a German reader can shed some light on this image and on Wildberg himself.

Postscript (Feb. 15, 2013): I have heard from a reader and collector on Bodo Wildberg. I will quote him directly: The bottom picture "shows an advertising stamp. These stamps were collectibles and very popular around 1900. Many companies (cigarettes, food, zoo, publishers, industrial companies, etc.) gave them away to promote their work. Today they are very hard to find as in 1920 they were already out of fashion." The stamp shows the cover of The Sixth Panther and Other Stories. Thanks to Lars Dangel for further information, corrections, and clarifications. Thanks to Mr. Dangel also for corrections to Wildberg's names.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales from Modern Ghosts (1890)

In late 1890, the New York publishing house of Harper & Brothers issued a finely-made book called Modern Ghosts. Introduced by the American writer and reformer George William Curtis (1824-1892), the book collected seven tales by European authors--and modern they were. "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant, was originally published in 1887, "Fioraccio," by Giovanni Magherini Graziani, in 1886. In picking up that little blue book, readers may very well have seen the first English translations of these tales from across the Atlantic. "The Horla" alone would have given them a fright.

Contents of Modern Ghosts:

"Introduction" by George William Curtis

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, translated from the French by Jonathan Sturges 

"Siesta" by Alexander L. Kielland, translated from the German version of M. von Borch by Charles Flint McClumpha

"The Tall Woman" by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, translated by Rollo Ogden

"On the River" by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Jonathan Sturges

"Maese Pérez, The Organist" by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, translated by Rollo Ogden

"Fioraccio" by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani [sic], translated by Mary A. Craig

"The Silent Woman" by Leopold Kompert, translated by Charles Flint McClumpha

I have listed these stories here for good reason, for all but one were reprinted three or four decades later in Weird Tales magazine, almost exactly in the order they appeared in Modern Ghosts. I suspect that Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, kept a copy of the book near at hand, turning to it again and again over an eight-year period during the 1920s and '30s. Perhaps it was to give his magazine an international air or to boost the prestige of Weird Tales. Then again, maybe it was simply to fill a gap when his page count ran short. In any case, between 1926 and 1934, Weird Tales reprinted six of the seven stories published in Modern Ghosts.

Re-printings in Weird Tales:

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (Weird Tales, Aug. 1926)

"Siesta" by Alexander L. Kielland (Weird Tales, Nov. 1930)

"The Tall Woman" by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (Weird Tales, Feb. 1929)

"On The River" by Guy de Maupassant (Weird Tales, Feb./Mar. 1931)

"Maese Pérez, the Organist" by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (Weird Tales, June 1934)

"Fioraccio" by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani (Weird Tales, Oct. 1934)

"The Silent Woman" by Leopold Kompert

As far as I know, Alexander L. Kielland was the only Norwegian author to be published in Weird Tales. I'm almost certain Giovanni Magherini Graziani was the only native-born Italian to have his byline in the magazine. His was also the last story from Modern Ghosts to be reprinted in Weird Tales. Leopold Kompert's story, "The Silent Woman," never made it into the magazine's pages. I'm not sure why. It could be that the book was simply set aside, nearly exhausted of material. Or maybe it was loaned out to someone, never to return. In any case, I would like to correct that oversight by reprinting "The Silent Woman" here sometime in the future. If someone has a faithful image or transcript of the story, feel free to submit it to me. I will give you full credit for your contribution.

I have already written about one of the authors of Modern Ghosts. As I write about the others, I will add links to this posting.

Links:

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

Alexander L. Kielland (1849-1906)

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833-1891)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) (The name can be spelled with or without an accent mark.)

Giovanni Magherini Graziani (1852-1924) (The correct punctuation is without a hyphen.)

Leopold Kompert (1822-1886)

Finally, the translators:

Jonathan Sturges (1864-1911) Author, translator of French, most often cited as a translator of Maupassant's stories

Charles Flint McClumpha (1863-1933) Author and translator of German

Rollo Ogden (1856-1937) Journalist, translator of Spanish, ordained minister, and editor of the New York Times, 1922-1937

Mary A. Craig (?-?) Translator of Italian

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley