Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988)

Aviator, Government Worker, Author, Investigator, Ufologist
Born June 20, 1897, Ottumwa, Iowa
Died November 29, 1988, New Market, Virginia

Donald Edward Keyhoe was born on June 20, 1897, in Ottumwa, Iowa, and attended the U.S. Naval Academy. Keyhoe graduated in 1920 1919 and was commissioned in the U.S. Marine Corps. He learned to fly airplanes and balloons but was injured in a plane crash in Guam in 1922. During his convalescence, he took up writing as a hobby. It's for his writing that he is known today.

Keyhoe's injury forced him to leave the military in 1923, whereupon he went to work for the National Geodetic Survey and the U.S. Department of Commerce. He kept his hand in aviation, though, by managing a national tour by Charles Lindbergh. He later served stateside in the U.S. military and afterwards test flew airplanes. Keyhoe's first book was Flying With Lindbergh (1928). He also wrote for pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, Dr. Yen Sin, and Flying Aces, for which he created two fictional aviators with super powers, Captain Philip Strange and flying ace Richard Knight. Keyhoe's other magazine clients included The American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and True. Keyhoe returned to active duty during World War II and retired as a major. 

During the war, pilots all over the world reported seeing so-called "foo fighters," small, illuminated orbs or objects that seemed to follow their aircraft. After the war, a plague of "ghost rockets" alarmed and puzzled people in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. Then, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot in the Pacific Northwest, sighted a group of disk-like objects that seemed to skip through the air like saucers on a pond. It didn't take long for a new term to enter the language: "flying saucers." It also didn't take long for flying saucers to become something like a religion in the minds of some. After all, here were angels for a technological age, sent to earth to save us from ourselves.

In 1949, the editor of True magazine contacted Donald Keyhoe, requesting an investigation into the flying saucers phenomenon. The resulting article, "Flying Saucers Are Real," appeared in True in January 1950 and in expanded form in The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950). The article was much talked about and the book sold over half a million copies in paperback. Its thesis: flying saucers are extraterrestrial craft--and the U.S. government knows it. Keyhoe wrote several more books on the subject: Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955), Flying Saucers: Top Secret (1960), and Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (1973). He was an early member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and assumed its directorship in 1957. He joined the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1981. Incidentally, Donald Keyhoe was interviewed by Mike Wallace, who just passed away, on ABC-TV in 1958.

Donald Keyhoe died on November 29, 1988, in New Market, Virginia. He is remembered as an even-keeled authority on flying saucers.

Donald E. Keyhoe's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Grim Passenger" (Apr. 1925)

"The Mystery Under the Sea" (Jan. 1926)

"Through the Vortex" (July 1926)

"The Master of Doom" (May 1927)

Further Reading

Some of Donald Keyhoe's work has fallen into the public domain and has been reprinted in new editions or reproduced for the Internet. You can see Mike Wallace's interview with Donald Keyhoe on YouTube. And of course you could do things the old fashioned way and read Keyhoe's books in their original editions.

The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe, a Gold Medal paperback from 1950. If this cover looks like the front of a science fiction magazine, it's for good reason. For one, flying saucers had been around for years before Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of them winging their way over Washington State. They were seen mostly by science fiction fans and always in two dimensions. For another, the cover illustration was by Frank Tinsley, a longtime pulp artist.

Here's a hardbound cover for Keyhoe's second book on flying saucers, Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953). Note the byline: "Major Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S. Marine Corps (ret.)." 

Here's British edition of the same book with a more colorful and provocative cover illustration from an unknown artist.

And a later American edition with a clever cover design ripped from the headlines.

A Spanish-language edition with a similar title: Platos Voladores de Otros Mundos, which I believe translates as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds.

The story of flying saucers took a more sinister turn as the 1950s went on, hence The Flying Saucer Conspiracy from 1955. 

Nearly three decades before, Donald Keyhoe's byline had appeared on an entirely different kind of publication: Weird Tales, a magazine of the strange and unusual. Investigators of the paranormal and extraterrestrial caution against the testimony of witnesses who have previously expressed an interest in such matters. They prefer disinterested testimony. I don't think Keyhoe's reputation was impugned by his authorship of stories for Weird Tales. After all, he was a retired Marine Corps pilot. The cover artist for Keyhoe's "Through the Vortex" was E.M. Stevenson.

Another pulp cover, another dragon, another woman in peril, and another pistol-packing hero. Here is Dr. Yen Sin for May-June 1936--the inaugural issue of the magazine--with a cover story, "The Mystery of the Dragon's Shadow," by Donald E. Keyhoe. I don't know who did the cover art.

Keyhoe's air stories have been collected in new editions, including this one, The Complete Adventures of Richard Knight.

And now, back to the flying saucer era and a movie based on the work of Donald Keyhoe, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, starring Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor and released in 1956. Don't let the B-movie-title fool you: this is an intelligent and engrossing movie owing in no small part to a screenplay co-written by Curt Siodmak, the same man who wrote screenplays for The Wolfman (1941) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). I'm not sure when the first real-world account of an alien abduction took place, but the Antonio Villas Boas Case (1957), the Betty and Barney Hill Case (1961), and countless subsequent cases bear a striking resemblance to the abduction scene in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. You can complicate things by saying the scene in the movie draws upon real-world events that preceded its production. Or you can entertain the notion that the first abductees drew upon memories (consciously or unconsciously) of seeing this movie prior to their own experiences. By the way, Joan Taylor, female lead in the film, died last month (on March 4, 2012) at age eighty-two. Also by the way, Ray Harryhausen, special effects man on the movie, consulted with flying saucer contactee George Adamski on the appearance of the craft. Finally, to close the circle, I Walked with a Zombie (which you could describe as Jane Eyre with zombies) was produced by Val Lewton, a contributor to Weird Tales.

Flying saucers come in all shapes and sizes. So do posters advertising flying saucer movies.

See what I mean?

Flying saucer sightings were a worldwide phenomenon of the 1950s. No wonder Earth vs. the Flying Saucers would show in France . . .

Italy . . .

or Scandinavia.

In the 1950s, people interested in the flying saucer phenomenon split into camps. One camp (which included George Adamski) held beliefs about saucer occupants that can only be called religious. Others looked at the phenomenon as a purely scientific or technological matter. (Some didn't even want to consider the possibility that flying saucers have occupants.) It looks like Donald Keyhoe fell into the second camp. In any case, the U.S. government investigated UFOs (as they were called) until 1969 when the report of the Condon Committee put a few nails in the coffin of the phenomenon. Ironically it was the same year in which a manned spacecraft from Earth first landed on another world. The Condon Committee concluded that a study of flying saucers would yield little if anything of scientific value. I disagree. Studying the phenomenon probably won't tell us anything about the things we see in the sky. But we can still learn a great deal about ourselves and why we believe the things we believe.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction-Part 3

Golden Age Authors in Weird Tales

Finally, the list. These are some of the authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction who contributed to Weird Tales. Their names appear here in chronological order of their first contribution to the magazine.

Lester del Rey

Pseudonym of Leonard Knapp

Aka Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey

Born June 2, 1915, Saratoga, Minnesota

Died May 10, 1993, New York, New York

For Weird Tales

"Cross of Fire" (May 1939)

Of the authors on this list, only Lester del Rey was first published in Weird Tales during the Farnsworth Wright era. "Cross of Fire" (May 1939) came early in his career as a writer and editor. Del Rey went on to edit a number of magazines and two lines of books--Ballantine Books and its division, Del Rey Books--all in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. He also wrote the introduction to The Best of C.L. Moore (1975), a collection of ten stories, three of which were drawn from Weird Tales, with six more from Astounding Science-Fiction or its companion magazine Unknown.

Nelson S. Bond

Born November 23, 1908, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Died November 6, 2006, Roanoke, Virginia

For Weird Tales

"The Unusual Romance of Ferdinand Pratt" (Sept. 1940)

"Honeymoon in Bedlam" (Jan. 1941)

"The Downfall of Lancelot Biggs" (Mar. 1941)

"Where Are You, Mr. Biggs?" (Sept. 1941)

"The Ghost of Lancelot Biggs" (Jan. 1942)

"Visibility: Zero" (Sept. 1942)

"The Master of Cotswold" (Jan. 1944)

Nelson Slade Bond enjoyed a varied career as a pulp fiction writer, newspaperman, philatelist, radio scriptwriter, public relations man, bookseller, and literary executor of the estate of James Branch Cabell. Bond wrote seven stories for Weird Tales, at least three of which recount the humorous adventures of the spaceman Lancelot Biggs.

Theodore Sturgeon

Né Edward Hamilton Waldo

Born February 27, 1918, Staten Island, New York

Died May 8, 1985, Eugene, Oregon

For Weird Tales

"Cell Mate" (Jan. 1947)

"Fluffy" (Mar. 1947)

"The Deadly Ratio" (Jan. 1948)

"The Professor's Teddy Bear" (Mar. 1948)

"Abreaction" (July 1948)

"The Perfect Host" (Nov. 1948)

"The Martian and the Moron" (Mar. 1949)

"One Foot and the Grave" (Sept. 1949)

Theodore Sturgeon wrote eight stories for Weird Tales, all dating from 1947-1949. (1) By that time he was a decade into a career that would eventually include scores of short stories, novels, anthologies, and television scripts, including two for Star Trek. Sturgeon is known for--among many other things--his adage in defense of science fiction: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." I presume that "everything" includes religion (or pseudo-religion), yet Sturgeon went along with Dianetics and late in life became an atheist. Sturgeon's adage reminds me of a quote from another writer, Ernest Hemingway: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, sh-t detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

(1) "Abreaction," the title of one of those stories, is a psychotherapeutic technique involving recalled or relived trauma as a kind of catharsis. L. Ron Hubbard observed abreactive therapy while in a U.S. Navy hospital during World War II and adapted it to the practice of Dianetics and Scientology. I haven't read "Abreaction," but it's interesting that Sturgeon and Hubbard struck upon the same topic, perhaps at about the same time. By the way, The Aberee was the title of an early newsletter (beginning in 1954) on topics related to Dianetics and Scientology. I'm not sure of the meaning of the word aberee, but I presume an aberee is a person who has undergone abreactive therapy. Or maybe an aberee is a person who has become aberrant. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

Eric Frank Russell

Aka Duncan H. Munro

Born January 6, 1905, near Sandhurst, Berkshire, England

Died February 28, 1978

And

Leslie J. Johnson

Born May 18, 1914, North Liverpool, England

Died ?

For Weird Tales

"Venturer of the Martian Mimics" (Mar. 1947)

"Displaced Person" (Sept. 1948)

"The Ponderer" (Nov. 1948)

"The Big Shot" (Jan. 1949)

"The Rhythm of the Rats" (July 1950)

"Hell's Bells" as by Duncan H. Munro (July 1952)

"Eternal Rediffusion" with Leslie J. Johnson (Fall, 1973)

Despite his English origins, Eric Frank Russell was published in Astounding Science-Fiction, Unknown, and Weird Tales, all of which were American magazines. His sometime collaborator was fellow Englishman Leslie J. Johnson, with whom he wrote his first story for Astounding. Russell penned seven tales for Weird Tales, six between 1947 and 1952, and the last in Sam Moskowitz's revival in the early 1970s. Johnson was his co-author on that story, entitled "Eternal Rediffusion." Interestingly, many of Russell's stories are on Fortean topics. Perhaps more interestingly, the Beatles' Apple Corporation purchased the movie rights for his novel Wasp, which never made it to film.

William Tenn

Pseudonym of  Philip Klass

Born May 9, 1920, London, England

Died February 7, 2010, Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania

For Weird Tales

"Mistress Sary" (May 1947)

William Tenn was the pseudonym of British-born American writer Philip Klass. An army veteran of World War II, Klass began publishing science fiction in 1946. "Mistress Sary," for Weird Tales (May 1947), would have been an early effort. Klass taught English and literature at Penn State University for nearly a quarter of a century.

Robert A. Heinlein

Born July 7, 1907, Butler, Missouri

Died May 8, 1988, Carmel, California

For Weird Tales

"Our Fair City" (Jan. 1949)

Robert A. Heinlein is far too interesting a character to cover in a mere paragraph. Suffice it to say, he was one of the most successful and well-known of science fiction authors by the time Weird Tales printed his story, "Our Fair City," in its January 1949 issue. Some interesting trivia and not-so-trivia: Heinlein graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and became an officer, as his friend L. Ron Hubbard had done after him. Discharged for medical reasons, Heinlein worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard during World War II and recruited Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work there as well. I wonder whether they were connected to the (apocryphal) Philadelphia Experiment. Even if Heinlein didn't participate in the invention of teleportation, he at least played his part in the invention of the waterbed. Incidentally, two earlier tellers of weird tales, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mark Twain, also mentioned waterbeds in their fiction.

Isaac Asimov

Born Between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, Petrovichi, Russian SFSR

Died April 6, 1992, New York, New York

and

James MacCreigh

Pseudonym of Frederik Pohl

Born November 26, 1919, Brooklyn, New York

For Weird Tales

"Legal Rights" by Isaac Asimov and James MacCreigh (Sept. 1950)

Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl are equally interesting characters. Of all the writers on this list, only Pohl is still living--and blogging! His blog, The Way the Future Blogs, is informative and up-to-date. (More so than my own: at this writing, his most recent entry is dated March 30, 2012, mine, only March 28, 2012.) You can reach it by clicking here.

Asimov and Pohl met as teenaged science fiction fans in New York City and became lifelong friends. Their collaborations include "Legal Rights," a story in Weird Tales from 1950, and--four decades later--the non-fiction book Our Angry Earth (1991).

L. Sprague de Camp

Né Lyon Sprague de Camp

Born November 27, 1907, New York, New York

Died November 6, 2000, Plano, Texas

and

(Murray) Fletcher Pratt

Born April 15, 1897, Buffalo, New York

Died June 11, 1956, Long Branch, New Jersey

For Weird Tales

"When the Night Wind Howls" with Fletcher Pratt (Nov. 1951)

"Where To, Please?" (Sept. 1952)

"Caveat Emptor" (Mar. 1953)

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were another pair of collaborators. Like Asimov, they wrote science fiction and non-fiction. Among de Camp's books was Science-Fiction Handbook (1953), an invaluable work for students of the genre. The book's author seems to have offended and outraged several generations of fans of both H.P. Lovecraft (through his 1975 tome, Lovecraft: A Biography) and Robert E. Howard (through his Conan pastiches and posthumous collaborations). On the plus side for Fletcher Pratt: his wife, Inga Marie Stephens Pratt Clark (1906–1970), was a science fiction illustrator.

If I have done my research right, only two stories by the authors listed above became Weird Tales cover stories. Here is the first: "Legal Rights" by Isaac Asimov and the pseudonymous James MacCreigh from the September 1950 issue. The artist was Bill Wayne. The man on the right looks suspiciously like Isaac Asimov.

And here's the second, "Hell's Bells" by Duncan H. Munro, aka Eric Frank Russell, from July 1952, with cover art by Jon Arfstrom.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction-Part 2

Astounding Firsts and Speculations

The list of authors whose first science fiction stories appeared in Astounding Stories or the renamed Astounding Science-Fiction is impressive. They include:

• Nelson S. Bond--"Down the Dimensions" (April 1937)
• Eric Frank Russell--"Seeker of Tomorrow" with Leslie J. Johnson (July 1937)
• L. Sprague de Camp--"The Isolinguals" (September 1937)
• Lester del Rey--"The Faithful" (April 1938)
• Robert A. Heinlein--"Life-Line" (August 1939)
• Theodore Sturgeon--"Ether Breather" (September 1939)
• William Tenn--"Alexander the Bait" (May 1946)

Fletcher Pratt and Frederik Pohl were also published in the pages of Astounding, though their first efforts saw print in other magazines. In any case, every one of these authors was also published in Weird Tales. I will cover them all in the third part of my article while saving other contributors to Astounding and Weird Tales--Anthony Boucher, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury--for another time.

I should note that most of these authors were first published in Weird Tales during Dorothy McIlwraith's tenure as editor and mostly after World War II. There may be some significance in that. Alternative markets may have shrunk away in the postwar period. That was certainly the case with comic books. The general public's interest in science fiction may have grown as well. After all, science fiction--which had predicted atomic power, rockets, and so on--had become science fact. Weird fiction by that time may have seemed a little old-fashioned. You might ask, "Did Dorothy McIlwraith actively seek out science fiction writers for her magazine?" I'm not sure if anyone knows the answer to that question. On the other hand, maybe these tales written by science fiction writers were simply leftovers from Campbell's Unknown, which had ceased publication in 1943.

I should also note that two of John W. Campbell's stable--A.E. van Vogt and L. Ron Hubbard--were not published in Weird Tales. Is that fact significant? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe van Vogt and Hubbard's brand of science fiction was simply not suited to "The Unique Magazine." Then again, maybe Weird Tales didn't pay well enough. Or maybe van Vogt and Hubbard weren't interested in writing weird or horror fiction, despite the fact that they--like their editor, John W. Campbell--were believers in Dianetics.

In any case, two religions have grown out of science fiction of the Golden Age. You can make a case that the first was the invention of Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures and cofounder of Fate. During the mid 1940s, Palmer had latched onto the Shaver Mystery as a way to sell magazines. Even as the Shaver Mystery faded away, Palmer discovered a much more powerful and compelling modern myth upon which to build a belief system: flying saucers. That system is with us today.

The second religion, Scientology, originally Dianetics, was invented by L. Ron Hubbard and advanced by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. A.E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon were just two of the many thousands of men and women who believed in Dianetics. Whether Hubbard had studied Raymond Palmer's successes and failures, or whether he discovered the appeal of a belief system based on science fiction on his own, his new religion has thrived, at least financially. It too is still with us.

For those who care to consider it, there is some irony in the fact that Raymond Palmer and John W. Campbell--two authors and editors at the helm of prominent science fiction magazines--would lend themselves to the genesis of religious or pseudo-religious beliefs. Weird Tales--a magazine of fantasy, horror, weird fiction, and the supernatural--was by comparison sensible and hard-headed. The only religion to grow out of its pages, the Cult of Cthulhu, was fictional and the creation of a materialist, H.P. Lovecraft.

To be concluded . . .

Raymond Palmer launched The Shaver Mystery in this issue of Amazing Stories with a cover story by Richard S. Shaver entitled "I Remember Lemuria." The date was March 1945, the artist, Robert Gibson Jones. It's worth noting, as Robert Weinberg did in his book, The Weird Tales Story, that Shaver's Deros were presaged by the Shonokins, a race of beings created by Manly Wade Wellman in the pages of "The Unique Magazine."

Next in this gallery of Shaver Mystery covers: Amazing Stories for November 1946 with a cover story, "The Return of Sathanas," by Shaver and Bob McKenna and cover art by Arnold Kohn.

The title "The Shaver Mystery" finally made the cover of Amazing in June 1947,  the same month in which Kenneth Arnold sighted the first flying saucers near Mount Rainier. Shortly thereafter, Raymond Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories, contacted Arnold and asked him to investigate the Maury Island Incident. That same summer, the one and only crashdown at Roswell happened and the flying saucer era was off to a running start.

The Shaver Mystery ran concurrently in Palmer's Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. Here's a cover for Richard Shaver's "Slaves of the Worm" from February 1948. The cover artist was the reliable Robert Gibson Jones.

Even as late as 1958, when this issue of Fantastic arrived on the newsstand, Shaver and Palmer were still at it. "Dangerous Nonsense!" shouted A.J. Steichert. "A Defense," retorted Richard S. Shaver. "The Facts Behind the Mystery," explained Raymond Palmer. By then, Palmer was concentrating on flying saucers. The cover art by the way was by Leo Summers.

In spring 1948, Palmer launched Fate, a digest-sized magazine investigating Fortean phenomena. Palmer knew on which side his bread was buttered: the cover story was "The Truth About Flying Saucers" by Kenneth Arnold. I hope someone can tell me who the cover artist was.

L. Ron Hubbard may well have been watching all this, for his "new science of the mind," Dianetics, and its successor, Scientology, look suspiciously like swipes, not only from the mythology of flying saucers, but also from The Shaver Mystery, hard science fiction of the 1940s, and space opera from an earlier era. Other probable sources include psychoanalysis, the culture of self-help, and Aleister Crowley's beliefs and practices.

Richard S. Shaver was probably mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic. Raymond Palmer on the other hand seems to have been shrewd and a bit of a huckster. Those traits would seem combined in the person of L. Ron Hubbard, who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. By the way, the artist on this cover of Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1950, was named Brush.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction-Part 1

Beginnings and Endings

An author once famously quipped that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve. More serious students of the genre consider its golden age to have commenced with John W. Campbell's assumption of full editorship of Astounding Stories in 1938. (1) John Wood Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) was himself an author of science fiction. Before assuming the helm of Astounding, he had written memorable stories under the pen name Don A. Stuart (2). After 1938, however, he wrote little in the way of fiction. Instead, he recruited, encouraged, and inspired a number of writers whose names have become synonymous with science fiction.

"The beginning of Campbell's particular Golden Age of [Science Fiction]," according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "can be pinpointed as the summer of 1939." (3) A.E. van Vogt made his science fiction debut that summer with "Black Destroyer" (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939). That same issue also included "Trends," one of Isaac Asimov's first stories in the genre. Robert A. Heinlein's first story, "Life-Line," appeared the following month. Campbell completed his grand slam in September with "Ether Breather," the first published science fiction story by Theodore Sturgeon. Campbell's stable of writers eventually grew to include Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, the husband-and-wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, and many others. Some were called away to wartime service, even as the concepts advanced by science fiction became reality. Radar, rockets, jet power, atomic weapons, supersonic flight--the list of innovations from those years, first dreamed up by science fiction writers--could go on and on. Under Campbell's guidance, Astounding and its authors continued to dominate science fiction after the war. 

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is said to have ended in the 1950s as old pulp titles toppled like tenpins. Although Astounding survived (it was renamed Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction in 1960) (4), Campbell seems to have lost his edge. He may also have lost his marbles, or at least the even keel and healthy skepticism necessary for a science fiction editor to do his best work. He became interested in paranormal and pseudoscientific ideas and was an early convert to L. Ron Hubbard's "new science of the mind," Dianetics. That conversion is all the more surprising because of Campbell's reputation for promoting what would later be called hard science fiction. (5, 6) In any case, for about a dozen years--from 1938 to about 1950--John W. Campbell was a leader in the field of American science fiction magazines.

During those same years Weird Tales underwent changes of its own. The editorial offices of the magazine moved from Chicago to New York City in 1938. In May 1940, a new editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, took over for long-serving Farnsworth Wright. She remained at her post until Weird Tales--like so many old pulp magazines--met its end in the 1950s. (7) In the meantime she published stories by Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, and many others.

McIlwraith is often criticized as an editor. Fans of Weird Tales consider it to have had its own golden age during the 1920s and '30s and she simply was not part of it. To be fair to McIlwraith, we should remember that Weird Tales had lost its mainstays in 1936-1937. Less than a year following the suicide of Robert E. Howard in June 1936, H.P. Lovecraft--the friend he had never met--died in poverty in Providence, Rhode Island. Thus "The Unique Magazine" lost two of its most accomplished and prolific authors. Moreover, it seems to have lost the two men at its heart.

To be continued. . .

Notes

(1) Campbell renamed the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction in March 1938, the first issue for which he was fully responsible.

(2) His most well-known story is "Who Goes There?" also known as "The Thing from Another World" (Astounding Science-Fiction, Aug. 1938). The story was included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections of the early 1970s and has been adapted to film three times. Incidentally, "Who Goes There?" bears a passing resemblance to "At the Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft, which had been serialized in Astounding Stories in February-April 1936, two and a half years before Campbell's tale made its debut.

(3) Coincidentally or not, 1939 is also called "the greatest year in the history of Hollywood."

(4) The actual title was Analog Science Fact [symbol] Science Fiction, where [symbol] was a new symbol created by John Campbell and symbolizing the expression "analogous to":

Thanks to Lambian of Wikipedia for providing the symbol.

(5) Dianetics wore some of the trappings of science fiction, including its reliance on an electrical gadget, the Mathison E-meter. By the way, the “new science of the mind” made its debut in a May 1950 article in Astounding Science-Fiction.

(6) According to Wikipedia, "[t]he term [hard science fiction] was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science-Fiction."

(7) Following the lead of Astounding, Weird Tales converted to digest size in the aftermath of World War II. I'm not sure, but I think the only science fiction and fantasy pulps to survive the 1950s were digest-sized. I hope someone can confirm or deny that.

An Astounding First . . .

"Black Destroyer," A.E. van Vogt's first published science fiction story, Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939. Cover art by Graves Gladney.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 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