Edison Marshall (1894-1967)

Author, Adventurer
Born August 28, 1894, Rensselaer, Indiana (1)
Died October 29, 1967, Augusta, Georgia

I have been writing about authors whose stories were reprinted in Weird Tales of the 1970s, after they had died. Edison Marshall is chronologically the last, as he was born on August 28, 1894, in Rensselaer, Indiana. If you're drawing up a list of writers who were also adventurers, you can include Edison Marshall along with E. Hoffman Price, Gordon MacCreagh, and George Griffith. In any case, Edison Tesla Marshall, named for the two combatants in the "War of Currents," came from a family of adventurers, at least in their own small ways. His father studied law but settled in Rensselaer, bought the local newspaper, and married the schoolmarm, who bore the singular name of Lilly Bartoo. Lilly was an artist and a poet. Her sister Jessie was one of the first women in Indiana to operate a photographic studio. Marshall's Aunt Minnie gave up teaching at age sixty to become the operator of a linotype machine.

As a boy, Marshall hunted and fished around his northern Indiana home. In 1907, he moved to Medford, Oregon, when his father retired from the newspaper business to become a orchardist. Marshall attended the University of Oregon from 1913 to 1915 or 1916 and began writing fiction as a student. He sold his first story, "When the Fire Dies," (2) to The Argosy when he was a freshman and another to The Saturday Evening Post at age twenty-one. Adventure stories, historical novels, and pulp fiction poured out of his typewriter after that. Except for one year in the U.S. Army during World War I, Marshall made his living solely as a writer.

By his early twenties, Edison Marshall had lost his left thumb, but that didn't stop him from becoming a hunter and adventurer the world over. After the war, with literary success in hand (or four-fifths of a hand), Marshall set off on trips to the Arctic, Africa, French Indo-China, and Burma, where he hunted grizzly bears, leopards, tigers, and the great sladang, the wild ox of Malaya. His hunting trophies couldn't match his accomplishments as a writer however. Marshall twice had stories placed in the annual O. Henry collection. These included "The Heart of Little Shikara," selected the best American short story of 1921. He followed that with scores of stories and articles for The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Field and Stream, Good Housekeeping, Liberty, and many other magazines. In 1939, Marshall turned to writing novels of history and adventure. Nine of his books were adapted to the movies. Strength of the Pines (published in 1921, filmed for release in 1922) was the first. Others included Benjamin Blake (1941), which became Son of Fury (1942) starring Tyrone Power; Yankee Pasha: The Adventures of Jason Starbuck (1947), which had its title shortened to Yankee Pasha (1954); and The Viking (1951), the title of which was pluralized for the 1958 classic starring Kirk Douglas. Also worth noting are Marshall's lost worlds romance, Dian of the Lost Land (1935), and The Lost Colony (1964), a historical novel of the Roanoke settlement and Virginia Dare.

Married to a Southerner during his year in the army, Edison Marshall returned to Georgia (where he had been stationed) in 1926. Over the course of his long career, he wrote from a home he called Breetholm, a place name he used in his novel Benjamin Blake. Author of forty-nine novels in all, Marshall became one of the most successful of popular writers. Like so many in that category, however, he saw his popularity and sales go into decline in later years. The New York Times observed his passing, which took place on October 29, 1967, at his Georgia home, with a photograph and a very brief obituary. The man who had written millions of words in his lifetime received only a few with the notice of his death.

Edison Marshall's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Serpent City" (Summer 1973, originally in The Blue Book Magazine, Nov. 1919)

"The Son of the Wild Things" (Summer 1974, originally in The Blue Book Magazine)

Notes

(1) I have seen birth dates of August 28 and August 29, each apparently asserted with confidence. Edison Marshall's World War I draft card, however, gives the date as August 28. Unless someone can come up with a better source, I'll stick with that.

(2) Sam Moskowitz gave the title as "The Sacred Fire."

Edison Marshall wrote historical novels of every era, but here is one set in a place close to home for him: South Carolina. This cover for an abridged version of Castle in the Swamp (1951) is one of Dell's renowned map backs. The front cover artist was George Mayers. Coincidentally, I wrote about Perley Poore Sheehan the other day. His story "Monsieur De Guise" is also set in a large house in a swamp.

You should never pass up an opportunity to show covers like this one for Gypsy Sixpence. The original edition was from 1949. Here's a later paperback edition with a cover from an unknown artist. 

Another historical period, another map back, this time for The Upstart (1950).

It's only fitting that a man named Marshall would write Westerns. The cover artist's signature is in the lower left, but I can't read it.

Here's a fuzzy scan of the cover of Earth Giant, a novel from the early 1960s when Biblical epics and sword-and-sandal movies were all the rage. The artist's signature is as fuzzy as the rest of the image.

I like to show foreign-language editions of American novels and stories. The cover artist on this Spanish edition was Armengol Terre.

The figures on this Spanish-language edition look very Nordic. The artist's name begins with a "P" I think, but that's all I can read.

Here's a French edition with a sketchy cover drawing.

In addition to writing adventure stories and historical novels, Edison Marshall wrote fantasy and science fiction. Dian of the Lost Land, from 1935, was one of his more sustained works in those genres. It has been reprinted repeatedly, including in this issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries from April 1949. The cover artist was Lawrence Sterne Stevens, aka Lawrence (1884-1960).

Here's the cover of the first edition, published in 1935. The artist's signature is in the lower right, but it's too small and illegible for me to read. 

Here's a Spanish-language edition of the same book. The artist was Juan Pablo Bocquet (1904-1966), a native of Barcelona. Thanks to "A Spaniard" for the information.

Chilton reprinted Dian of the Lost Land in 1966. Curtis Books reissued it with a new title, The Lost Land, in 1972. The book concerns an air expedition to Antarctica and a search for a secret valley. According to the blurb on the back cover, two explorers discover "a lost world ruled by a race of creatures from the darkest depths of time." That same description might also be applied to "At the Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft, which was written in 1931 but not published until 1936, when it was serialized in Astounding Stories. Without a doubt, Marshall's novel owes something to stories of lost worlds from the past. (She by H. Rider Haggard comes to mind.) In any case, we can add Dian of the Lost Land to the list of Arctic and Antarctic fantasy and science fiction. The cover art doesn't appear to be signed and there is no credit on the inside of the book, but this looks like the work of the Spanish artist Gervasio Gallardo, who was very active in creating fantasy book covers during the early 1970s.

The Viking, published in 1951, was one of Edison Marshall's most popular books . . .

In 1958, it was made into a movie called The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh. (Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were married at the time.) That looks like Ernest Borgnine bringing up the rear in this poster. Borgnine, a navy veteran of World War II, died earlier this year. After sailing around on a longboat in The Vikings, he hopped onto a PT boat for his starring role in McHale's Navy. That show made its debut fifty years ago in October and ran for four seasons on ABC-TV. Unlike so many stage and movie actors who acted in television, he didn't become typecast and went on to play serious roles--and not-so-serious roles, such as the voice of Mermaid Man on SpongeBob SquarePants. In any case, we have lost another irreplaceable actor.

Finally, a publicity photo from The Vikings with Kirk Douglas and Janet Leigh, a woman of unquestionable beauty and extraordinary pulchritude. She made two of the very best American movies within two years of each other, Psycho in 1960 and The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.

Now, four "by the ways": First, Psycho was of course based on the book by Robert Bloch, a contributor to Weird Tales. Second: Janet Leigh appeared in The Manchurian Candidate and Three on a Couch with the actress Leslie Parrish. I call that an odd combination, not of actresses but of movies. Third, in Psycho, Janet Leigh was the woman killed by the creepy male lead. In The Manchurian Candidate, Leslie Parrish suffered that fate. Finally, have the children of Kirk Douglas and Janet Leigh ever acted together?

Text and captions copyright 2012, 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

Perley Poore Sheehan (1875-1943)

Reporter, Editor, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Screenwriter, Movie Director
Born June 11, 1875, Cincinnati, Ohio
Died September 30, 1943, Sierra Madre, California

Perley Poore Sheehan was born on June 11, 1875, in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a young man, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Hamilton, Ohio, before setting off for Union College in Schenectady, New York, with fifty dollars in his pocket. When he graduated in 1898 with a degree in philosophy, he still had his fifty dollars. As the New York Times said of him, "Mr. Sheehan considered faith a substitute for cash."

After his graduation, Sheehan worked on newspapers in New York. Having saved a little money, he decided to see a bit of the world. Starting with Cuba, he made his way to Spain, then to France. Sheehan arrived in Paris without knowing the language and with only ten dollars to his name. Nonetheless, within five years he had become editor of the Paris Herald, the Paris edition of the New York Herald. Sheehan held that post from 1905 to 1907. He was also a correspondent in Paris and London. While in France, Sheehan padded his bankroll, added to his knowledge of the French language, and found himself a Gallic wife. Her name was Virginia (or Virginie) Pont and they were married on May 18, 1902, in France.

Perley Poore Sheehan returned to the land of his birth in 1908. It didn't take him long to begin placing stories in American magazines. The Fiction Mags Index lists his many credits between 1909 and 1933, but I'm not sure that list is complete. His specialty was adventure, and he contributed to The Argosy, The All-Story Weekly, Thrilling Adventures, and other titles. Sheehan's continuing characters included Captain Trouble and Kwa, a Tarzan-like jungle hero. It should come as no surprise that Sheehan also contributed to Munsey's Magazine, for he served as associate editor of that publication for some time beginning in 1908. He also edited The Scrap Book under his sometime co-author, Robert H. Davis. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database also lists some of Sheehan's tales, evidence that he wrote in genres other than just plain adventure. I have combined a couple of different lists to come up with the following one. These are short stories and serials only. Sheehan's other titles follow.

Short Stories and Serials by Perley Poore Sheehan:

• "Monsieur De Guise" The Scrap Book (Jan. 1911)
• "The Copper Princess" The All-Story (Sept. 1913)
• "The Woman of the Pyramid" The All-Story (Mar. 1914)
• "The Ghost Mill" All-Story Weekly (Apr. 4, 1914)
• "The Queen of Sheba" All-Story Weekly (Apr. 18, 1914)
• "Judith of Babylon" All-Story Cavalier Weekly (serial beginning Feb. 6, 1915)
• "Abu the Dawn-Maker" All-Story Cavalier Weekly (serial beginning May 8, 1915)
• "The Abyss of Wonders" The Argosy (Jan. 1915)
• "The Belated Tears of Louis Marcel" Munsey's Magazine (July 1915)
• "The Superscoundrel" All-Story Weekly (June 16, 1917)
• "The One Gift" (1920)

From Munsey's Magazine:

• "The Black Abbott"
• "The Fighting Fool"
• "The Green Shiver"
• "Kwa and the Ape People"
• "The Red Road to Shamballah"
• "Spider Tong"
• "Where Terror Lurked"

In addition to writing short stories and serials, Sheehan wrote plays:

• "Efficiency: A Play in One Act" (with Robert H. Davis) (1917)
• "Blood and Iron: A Play in One Act" The Strand Magazine (Oct. 1917)

and books:

• The Seer (1912)
• The Prophet (1912)
• "We Are French!" (with Robert H. Davis) (1914)
• The Abyss of Wonders (1915)
• Those Who Walk in Darkness (1917)
• The Passport Invisible (1918)
• The One Gift (1920)
• The House with a Bad Name (1920)
• The Ten-Foot Chain: or, Can Love Survive the Shackles? (1920; Sheehan's contribution to this "symposium" is entitled "Princess or Percheron")
• The Whispering Chorus (1928)
• King Arthur (1936)
• Heidi (1936)
• Lola Montez, Her Pagan Majesty, or, Queen Errant (1936)
• Blennerhassett (1937)
• The Abyss of Wonders (1953) illustrated by John T. Brooks

In 1919, Sheehan made the move from straight prose to scenarios for the silver screen. In 1920, he was still based in Manhattan, but by 1940, Sheehan was living in California and his movie career was winding down. In the meantime, his stories were adapted to film and Sheehan himself wrote scenarios for a number of silent pictures:

• The Dragon (1916)
• The Bugler of Algiers (1916)
• The Whispering Chorus (1918)
• Brave and Bold (1918)
• A Society Sensation (1918)
• Upstairs (1919)
• Three Sevens (1921)
• For Those We Love (1921)
• If You Believe It, It's So (1922)
• Always the Woman (1922)
• The Old Homestead (1922)
• The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1922)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
• The Night Message (1924)
• Love and Glory (1924)
• The Way of All Flesh (1927)

And talkies:

• The Lost City (serial, 1935)
• King Arthur (1936)
• The Victim of Lust (1940)
• Ihtiras kurbanlari (a posthumous credit from Turkey, 1953)

Sheehan checked off another box by directing the movie The Night Message, released in 1924. By that same year, according to a poorly designed website,

a Hollywood mythos was clearly emerging. Perley Poore Sheehan, a popular screenwriter, issued a bizarre tract called Hollywood as a World Center, which combined elements of small-town boosterism, industry braggadocio, and occult transcendentalism (known locally as "new thought"). For Sheehan, "The rise of Hollywood and its parent city, Los Angeles, has world-wide significance. It is a new and striking development in the history of civilization. . . . This flooding of population to the Southwest has its origins in the dim past. It is the culmination of ages of preparatory struggle, physical, mental and spiritual. In brief, we are witnessing the last great migration of the Aryan race." Going beyond traditional American disdain for the eastern cities, Sheehan saw the birth of Hollywood as the dawn of the Aquarian age and described a New Jerusalem that would reveal to all mankind the "Universal Subconscious."

If all that's true, then the web of crackpot ideas becomes a little more tangled. If you pull on a thread, you never know what might fall out.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Sheehan's last movie credit while he was living was The Victim of Lust, released in 1940. By that time, the writer was residing in Sierra Madre, California, amongst a garden of castoff plants, marked by a homemade stone lych-gate. He had also returned to newspaper work, writing a column for the Sierra Madre News. The Los Angeles Times noted that he had forsaken the high collars and spats of his days in Paris for an open collar and no tie.

Perley Poore Sheehan died on September 30, 1943, in Sierra Madre, California. Thirty years later, Sam Moskowitz included Sheehan's short story, "Monsieur De Guise," in his four-issue revival of Weird Tales. Moskowitz opened his introduction with these words:

Perley Poore Sheehan wrote in an era of the great scientific romancers--Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, A. Merritt, Francis Stevens--and his work compares favorably with the best of them. Yet, as occasionally happens to fine writers, it is rare to find his stories reprinted.

and closed it thus:

["Monsieur De Guise"] will go down on your mental list of all-time favorites.

Perley Poore Sheehan's Story in Weird Tales
"Monsieur De Guise" (Summer 1974, originally in The Scrap Book, Jan. 1911)

A philosophy major who made his living as a newspaper reporter and editor, Perley Poore Sheehan turned to writing fiction after ten years abroad. Here's a cover with his byline from June 27, 1914. 

Sheehan specialized in adventure stories as in "Abu the Dawn-Maker" from All-Story Cavalier Weekly, May 8, 1915.

Next came books. Here's an eerie cover from 1928, artist unknown.

Sheehan's biggest hit as a scenarist was probably The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a star vehicle for Lon Chaney in 1923.

That movie was the inspiration for an Aurora model manufactured four decades later.

Sheehan had dealt in lost worlds earlier in his career. He got back into the act with his screenplay (co-written with two others) for the 1935 serial The Lost City. Kane Richmond, who received second billing here, also played during his career: The Shadow, Spy Smasher, and Brick Bradford.

I have written a lot on Perley Poore Sheehan and have barely covered his credits or much on his career. I welcome corrections and additions. I hope someone can pick up the baton from here and complete a biography and bibliography.

Revised slightly on October 20, 2019
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