Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975)

Author, Poet, Essayist, Editor, Teacher, Reporter, Feminist, Socialist, Insurance Adjustor, Fortean Investigator
Born August 21, 1888, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died March 22, 1975, Ambassador Hotel, San Francisco, California

Miriam Allen deFord was born on August 21, 1888, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Moïse deFord and Frances Allen deFord, both of whom were physicians. She grew up in Philadelphia and attended Wellesley College, Temple University, and the University of Pennsylvania. While attending Wellesley, she worked as a journalist for the Philadelphia North American. After graduating college in 1911, she wandered through Boston, San Diego, Spokane, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, and other places in California. Along the way she held odd jobs, worked as a reporter, spoke out on socialist, feminist, and pacifist causes, and picked up two husbands in succession, the anarchist and mystic William Armistead Nelson Collier, Jr. (1874-1947), and the socialist, lecturer, and author Maynard Shipley (1872-1934). (1)

Even after arriving in California in 1915, Miriam's peregrinations continued. In 1920 she and her second husband moved to Sausalito. In 1922 they left the Socialist Party, and from 1924 to 1932 focused on their work with the Science League of America. Maynard Shipley died in 1934. In mourning, his widow went to Hawaii, then retreated to the East before returning to San Francisco. By the early 1940s, Miriam Allen deFord was living in the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco, where she resided for all or most of what remained of her life. You can read more about Miriam Allen deFord on a blog called From an Oblique Angle by Joshua B. Buhs, here.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in 1950 as Isaac Asimov claimed, then Miriam Allen deFord squeezed in at the end with her story "The Last Generation" published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, that was her first work in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, but it came only about halfway through a career that stretched from 1920 to her death in 1975. (2) The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction disagrees:

She began to publish work of genre interest with "The Neatness of Ann Rutledge" for The Westminster Magazine in 1924, releasing close to eighty sf and fantasy stories over the next decades, mostly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1951 and 1970, though several tales appeared later.

I think we can take the author's word as final. In the Winter issue 1973, Sam Moskowitz printed her stories "The Cats of Rome" and "Ghostly Hands" in his revived Weird Tales. According to Moskowitz, "Ghostly Hands" was originally printed in the magazine Tales of Magic and Mystery in January 1928. In the Summer issue 1974, Miriam submitted a clarification to "The Eyrie":

["Ghostly Hands"] was originally called "The Neatness of Ann Rutledge" (they chopped off the final "e"), and it appeared in a defunct magazine called Westminster sometime around 1924. Tales of Magic and Mystery apparently just swiped it without notifying them or me--or paying for it. They changed Ann's name to Jane . . . .

Miriam Allen deFord contributed most frequently to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, co-edited by Anthony Boucher. Her first story for that magazine was the aforementioned "The Last Generation" from the magazine's second issue. Her last in her lifetime was "The Treyans Are Coming" from June 1974.

Like Boucher, Miriam was a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. The two met in 1943 when Boucher was investigating falls of stones from out of the sky, near Oakland. He consulted with her on similar falls that she had investigated in Chico in 1922. An active Fortean, she and her husband had corresponded with Charles Fort between 1921 and Fort's death in 1932. "We never met in person," she wrote, "but we became good friends on paper." (3) In January 1954, Boucher and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published her essay "Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science."

According to The FictionMags Index, Miriam Allen deFord's first published story was "Little Bit" in Little Story Magazine for July 1920. (2) Over the next half century and more, she had scores of stories in titles that included Amazing Science Fiction, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, Brief Stories, Double Dealer, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Fantastic Universe, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, The Overland Monthly, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Scribner's, Space Stories, Startling Stories, Top-Notch, and Venture Science Fiction. Miriam had three stories in Weird Tales and was one of only a few authors who contributed to the original magazine and to the revival of 1973-1974. Her letter to "The Eyrie," quoted above, would have been one of her last published works during her lifetime.

Miriam's credits include not only dozens of science fiction and fantasy stories from 1950 to 1974, but also two collections of her own stories, Xenogenesis (1969) and Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow (1971); many stories anthologized in other books; a number of Little Blue Books; non-fiction books, including Bellamy's Looking Backward (1944), The Real Bonnie and Clyde (1968), and The Real Ma Barker (1970); a biography of her husband, Up-Hill All The Way: The Life of Maynard Shipley (1956); and the editorship of Space, Time and Crime (1964). A few of her stories were also adapted to television.

Miriam Allen deFord died at the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco on March 22, 1975. She was eighty-six years old.

Miriam Allen deFord's Stories and Letter in Weird Tales

"Never Stop to Pat a Kitten" (July 1954)

"The Cats of Rome" (Winter 1973)

"The Ghostly Hands" (Winter 1973)

Letter to "The Eyrie" (Summer 1974)

Further Reading
See the websites of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The FictionMags Index, The Speculative Fiction Database, and Wikipedia for more on Miriam Allen deFord. You may find more complete and accurate information on the Online Archive of California and the Suffragists Oral History Project, here.

Notes

(1) Miriam married Collier on February 14, 1915, in La Jolla and divorced him in 1920. She married Shipley on April 16, 1921, in Santa Rosa. That marriage lasted until his death on June 18, 1934.
(2) According to Sam Moskowitz in Weird Tales, Winter 1973, her writing career began in 1907.

(3) Quoted in Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained by Damon Knight (1970), p. 170.

Space, Time & Crime, an anthology edited by Miriam Allen deFord, in the 1968 edition with a cover by Jack Gaughan.

Xenogensis (1969) with cover art by Richard Powers.

Update: Another edition of Space, Time & Crime, this one from 1964 with a cover by Richard Powers.

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fortean Writers in Weird Tales

The Book of the Damned, the first of Charles Fort's four compilations of weird and unexplained phenomena, was published on December 1, 1919, to mixed reviews. The New York Times wrote:

[Any] conclusion . . . is so obscured in the mass of words and quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation that the average reader will find himself either buried alive or insane before he reaches the end. (1)

H.G. Wells, himself a believer in nonsense, called Fort "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers." (2) Theodore Dreiser, Fort's champion, considered him "simply stupendous." (3) Ben Hecht, writing for the Chicago Daily News, was even more effusive:

I am the first disciple of Charles Fort. He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. The onslaught will perish. The lunacy will survive, entrenching itself behind the derisive laughter of all good citizens. I, however, for one, rush to surrender my homage. Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he has delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world. Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not. Henceforth I am a Fortean. (4)

Born on August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, Charles Fort was an impoverished journalist, novelist, and writer of short stories before turning his attention to all things unexplained--at least in any satisfactory way--by science. Three compilations of these "data" as he called them followed The Book of the Damned. They were: New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). The last arrived in bookstores on May 5, 1932, just two days after Fort's death. Fort's wife survived him, as did his monumental works. Fortean has since become a word to describe the followers of Fort (thanks to Ben Hecht) as well as the phenomena themselves (collectively known as Forteana). Today there are Fortean societies all over the world.

There are also writers of Fortean fiction and have been since the beginning. Weird Tales, "The Unique Magazine," was one place where they could gather. In his remembrance of the editor Farnsworth Wright, E. Hoffman Price wrote:

Inevitably, Farnsworth was thrilled by the works of Charles Fort, the rebel who spent a lifetime trying to shatter the solemn pretenses of science, and in debunking the sacerdotal attitude of scientists. Whether he agreed or disagreed with Fort, I don't know, and it makes no difference; the essence of it was that he admired the iconoclastic approach, the startling phrases, the audacity of the wildman who juggled suns and stars and sciences. (5)

Edmond Hamilton was a young correspondent of Charles Fort and one of the first Fortean writers of fiction. His story "The Earth Owners" from Weird Tales, August 1931, was an early example in the genre (or sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre). Hamilton pointed out that he himself was preceded by George Allan England and his story "The Thing from--'Outside'" from Science and Invention, April 1923, reprinted in Amazing Stories, April 1926. (6) George Allan England (1877-1936) did not contribute to Weird Tales. Some Fortean writers who did include:

• Eando Binder
• Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994)
• Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975)
• Vincent H. Gaddis (1913-1997)
• Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977)
• Damon Knight (1922-2002)
• Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994)
• H. Beam Piper (1904-1964)
• Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978)

According to Robert J.M. Rickard, founder and editor of the British magazine Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena, "John Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction . . . encouraged many authors to expand Fort's data and comments into imaginative stories." (7) And of course Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and Fate, modeled on the Fortean magazine Doubt, was also inclined towards Forteana. It's interesting that Campbell, the most scientifically minded of the three editors--Wright, Palmer, and himself--was also the one who fell hardest for pseudoscientific claptrap.

Fort's influence continued beyond the golden age of pulps and science fiction. The novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954, 1955), about which I wrote recently, alludes to Fort in recounting stories of frogs falling from the sky, spontaneous human combustion, and of course the manifestation of "mysterious objects" on a farm outside Santa Mira, California. In fact the entire story is framed in Forteana with this as its closing paragraph:

But . . . showers of small frogs, tiny fish, and mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of the skies. Here and there, with no possible explanation, men are burned to death inside their clothes. And once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifter and altered. You read these occasional queer little stories, humorously written, tongue-in-cheek, most of the time; or you hear vague, distorted rumors of them. And this much I know. Some of them--some of them--are quite true. (8)

Charles Fort didn't think much of science or scientists, yet his "data" are now everywhere in science fiction. He inspired writers of fantasy and weird fiction, too, and even appears as a character in the recent movie adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft. Between the two--between science and the supernatural--lies pseudoscience, which you might say was invented by Charles Fort. As a believer in the continuity of all things, he would not have recognized a difference among science, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. He may very well have felt comfortable inhabiting those in-between spaces--or as comfortable as he felt at any time inhabiting this strange planet.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer (2008), with Mr. Steinmeyer's brackets and ellipses, p. 11.

(2) Quoted in Steinmeyer, p. 11.

(3) Quoted in Steinmeyer, p. 12.

(4) Quoted in Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained by Damon Knight (1970), p. 70.

(5) From "Farnsworth Wright" by E. Hoffman Price in The Weird Tales Story by Robert Weinberg (1977), p. 11.

(6) See Knight, p. 171 and notes 161 and 162 on p. 216.

(7) Quoted on Wikipedia.
(8) Ellipses and italics are in the original.

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort in a British (?) paperback edition.

Lo! in the original hardbound edition illustrated by artist and raconteur Alexander King (1899-1965).

Charles Fort's ideas have permeated our culture, even showing up in cartoons by Charles Addams. From Creature Comforts (1981).

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rod Serling and Weird Tales

Yesterday I wrote about Charles Beaumont. That leads me today to Rod Serling (1924-1975) and The Twilight Zone.

Not long ago I read a story reprinted from Weird Tales--I wish I could remember the title--and when I reached the end, I thought, "This is like an episode of The Twilight Zone." Then it occurred to me that a story from Weird Tales isn't like an episode of The Twilight Zone. If anything, the reverse is true, for Weird Tales came first. That leads to this question: Was Rod Serling a reader of Weird Tales in his youth? It took me awhile to find the answer.

I started with a biography, Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone by Joel Engel (1989). The book lacks an index, so I had two choices: read it or page through it. I paged through it and finally came to this:

So what attracted Rod Serling, the writer, to the world of the fantastic? Bob Serling says that his brother told him "The Twilight Zone" sprang from his frequent insomniac nights, when his active imagination--fed by his lifelong love of horror films, his war experiences, and the stories of such writers as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft--contrived fantastical plots that seemed plausible in the predawn. Carol Serling says that her husband "wanted to believe" in the unseen, but had no direct experiences himself. (p. 103)

Although Robert A. Heinlein contributed to Weird Tales, he was more closely associated with Astounding Science-Fiction. Ray Bradbury had twenty-five stories printed in Weird Tales beginning with the November 1942 issue. It's likely that if he read Ray Bradbury, Serling also read Weird Tales. However, in pretty rapid order, Rod Serling turned eighteen (on December 25, 1942), graduated from high school (in late January 1943), was inducted into the army (the next day), and boarded a bus for Fort Niagara (on February 3). In other words, he got exactly one chance to read a story by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales before reaching draft age. But Bob Serling mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, too, and though Lovecraft's works were reprinted here and there after his death in 1937, his name is inextricably linked with the magazine Weird Tales.

Still no proof.

Next I found The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (1982). The index in that book is scanty. That meant more page-by-page searching--but not much. Here's Bob Serling again on page 3:

We were fairly close as kids . . . . The two of us used to read Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales--all of the pulps.

With that, we can put Rod Serling with Ward Cleaver on the list of famous readers of Weird Tales.

All that brings up another question. Was The Twilight Zone in the genre of weird fiction? I can't say. I have never read a good definition of the term weird fiction. But there are episodes of The Twilight Zone that are very much like stories from Weird Tales. Rod Serling read Weird Tales as a boy. In his insomnia, he "contrived fantastical plots." Although Weird Tales met its end in 1954, it would still have been fresh in the memory when The Twilight Zone made its debut in 1959. Maybe one way of thinking of Rod Serling's brainchild is simply as a continuation in the spirit of Weird Tales.

Note: You can read more about Rod Serling and Weird Tales in my article of September 16, 2011, "Weird Tales on Film: Rod Serling's Night Gallery," here.

Rod Serling (1924-1975), not from The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) but from Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1970-1973).

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Charles Beaumont (1929-1967)

In writing about Ben Hecht, I mentioned the writer Charles Beaumont. I have mentioned him before in my article about his friend, Richard Matheson (1926-2013). I will write about him again today.

Charles Beaumont has been gone for nearly half a century, yet there was a time when his name or work was in every medium--in books, comic books, magazines, television, and movies--and in essays, articles, reviews, fiction, and drama. If he had lived, it's easy to imagine that he would have joined Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury in a category of men whose names are synonymous in our popular culture with fantasy, fear, dread, and horror. Unfortunately, Charles Beaumont died a strange and premature death.

Born Charles Leroy Nutt on January 2, 1929, Beaumont contracted spinal meningitis as a child. In his invalid state, he began reading the Wizard of Oz books, then Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. With that, he later said, "the jig was up." He published his own science fiction fanzine, Utopia, as a teenager and wrote letters to science fiction magazines. He even drew pictures for the pulps and co-illustrated Out of the Unknown by A.E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull (1948) under the name "Charles McNutt."

After knocking around for awhile (and changing his name twice), Beaumont had his first published story, "The Devil You Say," in Amazing Stories in January 1951. He turned twenty-two that month and his writing life was on. Over the next fifteen years he wrote dozens more stories published in If, Orbit, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Infinity Science Fiction, and Gamma. Playboy accepted his story "Black Country" (Sept. 1954) as its first published short fiction. Thereafter Playboy kept him on retainer and listed him as a contributing editor.

In his tenure at Playboy, Beaumont wrote a series of nostalgic articles collected in the book Remember? Remember? in 1963. Among them is an essay called "The Bloody Pulps," of which he wrote:

Happily, no sober, critical evaluation of them is possible. Like any other narcotic, they defy rational analysis. One can speak of their effect, even of their ingredients, but not, without wearisome and unconvincing pomposity, of their causes. Something in them froze the addict's critical faculties. He might entertain a difference of opinion on the relative merits of Putnam's and Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, but on the subject of Weird Tales he was, and is, adamant. (1)

Beaumont wrote for other men's magazines as well, including Manhunt, Nugget, and Rogue. His stories have been reprinted and anthologized in the years since their first appearance, including in several of his own books. The first, The Hunger and Other Stories, came out in 1957.

If you watched Twilight Zone (1959-1964) in its original run or in syndication, you could not have avoided seeing Charles Beaumont's name in the credits. He wrote or co-wrote twenty-two episodes in all, second only to the creator Rod Serling. Writer William F. Nolan remembered:

Chuck was the perfect Twilight Zone writer, more than Matheson or Rod Serling, even. Matheson is very much of a realist who can mentally lose himself in those worlds. He doesn't live in them the way Chuck lived in them. Chuck actually lived in the Twilight Zone. (2)

Beaumont also wrote scripts for Steve Canyon, Buckskin, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun-Will Travel, Naked City, Route 66, Thriller, and other television shows. His film scripts were far fewer in number, but his list of credits is impressive. His first was Tradita from 1954. Then came Queen of Outer Space (1957) from an outline by Ben Hecht. Beaumont co-wrote (with Richard Matheson and George Baxt) the screenplay for Burn! Witch! Burn! (1962), based on Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife. Other adaptations included Premature Burial (1962) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), both from Poe; The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962); The Haunted Palace (1963), from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft; and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) from the novel by Charles G. Finney.

William F. Nolan observed that Charles Beaumont "actually lived in the Twilight Zone." In a way, he also died in the Twilight Zone. At thirty-four, he came down with a mysterious illness that caused constant headaches, weight loss, slurred speech, and a rapid and premature aging. Towards the end, he "looked ninety-five," according to his son Christopher. (3) Described by his friend Richard Matheson as "meteoric," (4) Charles Beaumont died on February 21, 1967, in Woodland Hills, California, after just sixteen years as a published writer and only thirty-eight years on this earth. 

Notes

(1) Page 120.
(2) Quoted in The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (1982), p. 74.

(3) Quoted on Wikipedia.

(4) The Twilight Zone Companion, p. 75.

Further Reading

"The Fifth Dimension. The Twilight Zone Interviews, Part Four: Christopher Beaumont" conducted by William P. Simmons in Cemetery Dance, Issue #55 (2006), pages 76-79.

The Hunger and Other Stories by Charles Beaumont (1957), his first book, with a cover design by Robert Clyne. 

The Hunger and Other Stories in a Bantam paperback edition from 1959. The cover art is a collage of work by Heinrich Kley and Hieronymus Bosch. 

Run from the Hunter (1957) by Charles Beaumont and John E. Tomerlin writing together as Keith Grantland.

Yonder, a second collection of stories from 1958. The cover artist is unknown, and though I wouldn't lay any money on it, it looks a little like the work of Richard Powers.

The Intruder, a hardbound novel from 1959. This might be the version with a cover by Robert Clyne. The word on the cover is ugly. It would never appear on the cover of a book today, even if people still use it. I considered not showing this cover here. But I don't think the word will go away by our ignoring it or running away from it. It will go away only when people stop thinking this way. By the way, The Intruder was made into a movie in 1962 with William Shatner in the lead role.

Night Ride and Other Journeys from 1960. The artist is unknown.

The Magic Man and Other Science-Fantasy Stories, yet another collection from 1965.  

The Magic Man in a British edition, also with a photo cover. 

The Edge, another British edition, from 1966.

Remember? Remember?, a collection of nostalgic essays from Playboy, reprinted in book form in 1963. Leo Manso designed the cover.

Charles Beaumont began his career in science fiction and fantasy as an artist named Charles McNutt. In 1948, at age nineteen, he contributed three illustrations to Out of the Unknown, a hardbound collection of stories by A.E. van Vogt and his wife, E. Mayne Hull. The cover art is by Roy Hunt.

Charles McNutt's interior illustration for "The Patient" by E. Mayne Hull. This is the only one of the three that bears his name. The others are only initialed. 

McNutt's illustration for "The Sea Thing" by A.E. van Vogt. Note the mix of scratchboard technique and pen. It seems a pretty good bet that McNutt--Beaumont--was influenced by Virgil Finlay.

An illustration for "The Wishes We Make" by E. Mayne Hull. Charles McNutt also drew pictures for Fantasy Book No. 1 (July 1947) and No. 2 (Feb. 1948). In November 1942, when the future Charles Beaumont was only thirteen, Startling Stories printed his letter to the editor in its November 1942 issue. 

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) in a serious mood, 1960.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Belle Goldschlager (1902-1988)

Aka Belle Baranceanu
Illustrator, Printmaker, Painter, Muralist, Teacher
Born July 17, 1902, Chicago, Illinois
Died January 17, 1988, La Jolla, California

Belle Goldschlager was born on July 17, 1902, in Chicago to Romanian-Jewish immigrants Abram Goldschlager and Mary Agnes Baranceanu Goldschlager. Belle had one sister, Teresa (1904-1987). When they were young, their parents divorced or separated and the girls were sent to live on their grandparents' farm in Williston, North Dakota. Belle was interested in dance and art, Teresa in music. Their family encouraged them in their interests.

The girls' parents reunited in 1920. Belle and Teresa went to live with them once again, in Minneapolis. Belle Goldschlager graduated from West High School in 1921 and studied at the Minneapolis School of Art under Anthony Angarola. She graduated in 1924 and spent 1924-1925 in post-graduate studies. In 1925 or 1926, she went to the Art Institute of Chicago to further her studies. Angarola was there at about that time also, and in that brief window, Belle Goldschlager contributed three illustrations to Weird Tales magazine. They were printed in the February and April issues of 1926.

Belle's father objected to her relationship with Angarola, one that had grown from teacher-student to something more. In 1926 or 1927, he sent her to live with her uncle, Zack Baroney, in Los Angeles. She spent two years in California and returned to Chicago in 1928 or 1929. Anthony Angarola had spent the year in Europe (Aug. 1928-Aug. 1929) on a Guggenheim Fellowship. At some point the two were engaged to be married, but Angarola died suddenly within days of his return to Chicago. Despite the loss, Belle Goldschlager stayed on in Chicago, teaching, painting, and exhibiting her work.

In 1932, Belle Goldschlager changed her name to Belle Baranceanu, her mother's maiden name. The following year she relocated to San Diego. Belle Baranceanu was a painter, printmaker, illustrator, and muralist. She also taught at numerous institutions, including the Frances Parker School (1946-1969), the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts (1946-1951), California Western University (1959), and the La Jolla School of Arts and Crafts. Her students called her "Miss B." Belle also painted murals in the La Jolla Post Office, La Jolla High School, and Roosevelt Junior High School. In 1950 she was elected president of the San Diego Art Guild.

Belle Baranceanu took part in many exhibitions from 1926 to 1985 and won a number of awards from 1931 to 1945. In addition to drawing pictures for Weird Tales, she illustrated two textbooks of gynecology written by Dr. George Huff. Late in life, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease. Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu died on January 17, 1988, in La Jolla, California. Her estate is managed by the San Diego Historical Society.

Belle Goldschlager's Illustrations in Weird Tales

"Red Ether" (Part One) by Pettersen Marzoni (Feb. 1926)

"The Other Half" by Edwin L. Sabin (Feb. 1926)

"The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft (Apr. 1926)

Further Reading

A simple search will turn up plenty of information on and images by Belle Baranceanu.

Note: In Jaffery and Cook's index to Weird Tales, Belle Goldschlager is misidentified as "B. Goldschlagel."

Three paintings by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu, top to bottom: "The Bobs at Riverview Park," "Still-Life," and "The Johnson Girl." 

And because she is so striking, two photographs of the artist in her roles as muralist and printmaker. Notice how her pose in the top photograph echoes that of the figure behind her.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)

In a letter to Richard Ely Morse, dated July 28, 1932, H.P. Lovecraft wrote:

Sorry to hear that Angarola is dead. He almost illustrated my "Outsider"—that is, he read it & told Wright he'd like to illustrate it just after the present illustration had been made & purchased!

Lovecraft had been an admirer of Angarola for many years prior to writing that letter and mentioned him in two stories. From "Pickman's Model" (1926):

There's something those fellows catch--beyond life--that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or--I hope to heaven--ever will again.

From "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928):

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint.

Wright was of course Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. Doré was Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a French artist known for his woodcuts illustrating a large number of literary works, including Paradise Lost (which Lovecraft mentioned in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner dated November 16, 1916). Sime was Sidney Sime (1867-1941), a British artist and an illustrator of works by Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, and Arthur Machen. Angarola was of course Anthony Angarola, about whom I wrote in my posting on Ben Hecht and about whom I'll write a little more today.

In his letter to Richard Ely Morse, Lovecraft mentioned that Angarola wanted to illustrate his story "The Outsider." Written in 1921 but not published until April 1926 in Weird Tales, "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, perhaps his signature story. If Angarola read it before it was published, he may have known the editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, either personally or by correspondence. I say may have because it's possible that Angarola read the story without Lovecraft's or Wright's knowledge. And thereby hangs a tale.

Son of Italian immigrants, Anthony or Antonio Angarola was born on February 4, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at a number of art schools throughout the Midwest, including the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee (1921), the Minneapolis School of Art (1922-1925), the Art Institute of Chicago (summers 1926-1928), and the Kansas City Art Institute (1926-1929). According to Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Tribune, "His pupils adored him." (1)

In the spring of 1916, Anthony Angarola met a young pianist, Marie Ambrosius. Over the next year and a half the two carried on a courtship and correspondence that culminated in a secret wedding in Elgin, Illinois, in August 1917. Together they had two children, Yvonne C. and Richard Anthony Angarola, but the marriage didn't last. In 1923, Marie Ambrosius Angarola's childhood guardians, Robert Ambrosius and his sister, Katherine Ambrosius, "engineered her divorce from Angarola." (2) Alone, wifeless, and childless, he carried on, teaching, painting, drawing, and traveling. From September 1928 to August 1929, he was in Europe on a whirlwind tour of painting under a Guggenheim Fellowship. While in France, he was involved in a car accident and spent some time in the hospital.

Angarola returned to the United States in August 1929, arriving in New York on August 2, then taking a train to Chicago. He dropped off his trunk at the Bradley Hotel and rushed to his daughter's birthday celebration in Glen Lake, Michigan, on August 8. The artist returned once again to Chicago on August 13. Four days later, on August 17, 1929, Anthony Angarola died at the Bradley Hotel of the results of his accident of many weeks or months before. He was just thirty-six years old.

The Chicago art world was shocked by the sudden loss of a greatly admired artist and mourned him for years afterward. When he died, Angarola was engaged to another artist and a former student, Belle Baranceanu. She was devastated by his death but carried on without him. Like her lost fiancé, she was a painter and a teacher. She lived out her life, unmarried, in California.

In 1924, Anthony Angarola's illustrations were published in The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht. It seems almost certain to me that H.P. Lovecraft first knew of Angarola's work through that book. From 1922 to the end of September 1925, Angarola taught at the Minneapolis School of Art. In June 1926, he landed a short-term position with the Art Institute of Chicago. (Angarola taught summer courses there in 1926-1928). In October 1926, he began work at the Kansas City Art institute and remained in that position almost three years. Even while he was away--in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or Kansas City--he remained connected to the Chicago art world. 

In 1926, Farnsworth Wright was presumably back and forth between Indianapolis and Chicago, for the offices of Weird Tales didn't make the full move to Chicago until late that year. As an editor with no art director, Wright would always have been on the lookout for new artists for his magazine. Indianapolis had the Herron School of Art and plenty of commercial artists. Chicago on the other hand had its Art Institute and a much more bustling art scene. Anthony Angarola never contributed illustrations to Weird Tales. As H.P. Lovecraft later wrote, "He almost illustrated my 'Outsider,'—that is, he read it & told Wright he'd like to illustrate it." Unfortunately he was too late. Another Chicago artist had completed the job, and it was her work that appeared in Weird Tales in April 1926. She had previously illustrated "The Red Ether" (Part One) by Pettersen Marzoni and "The Other Half" by Edwin L. Sabin, both in the February 1926 issue of the magazine. Her illustration for "The Outsider" was her third and last for Weird Tales. The artist's name was Belle Goldschlager and she had been a student of Anthony Angarola at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I said that Angarola may have read "The Outsider" without Lovecraft's or Wright's knowledge. That's only speculation. A manuscript would probably have been in the possession of his student and the illustrator of the story, Belle Goldschlager. If so, it would also have been in the hands of his future fiancée, Belle Baranceanu, for Belle Goldschlager and Belle Baranceanu were one in the same person.

Notes

(1) "Two Memorial Exhibitions: Work of Tennessee Anderson and Anthony Angarola on View Local Galleries" by Eleanor Jewett, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 22, 1931, p. H4.

(2) From "Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)" by Richard Angarola, Connie Poore, and Joel Dryer writing for the Illinois Historical Art Project at:

http://www.illinoisart.org/#!anthony-angarola/cffh.

An illustration by Anthony Angarola from The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht (1924).

"Bench Lizards," a more conventional piece by Angarola (1926). Images of Angarola's art are hard to come by on the Internet. I wish I had more to offer.

Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)

Richard Angarola (1920-2008), son of the artist and a character actor in movies and television. Angarola was in lots of TV shows, often in ethnic roles. His credits include episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, My Living Doll, Honey West, The Rat Patrol, It Takes a Thief, and Mission: Impossible. 

Happy Columbus Day to Italian-Americans Everywhere!

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Ben Hecht (1894-1964)-Part 2

Ben Hecht is best known for his work in the movies. He arrived in Hollywood in 1926 at the behest of his friend and fellow screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. In every year from then until his death in 1964, Hecht wrote for at least one and sometimes as many as half a dozen movies or television shows.

Hecht was known for his rapid-fire dialogue. His typewriter was rapid-fire as well. Spending a few weeks in Hollywood every year, he made enough to support himself in his more serious writing back home in New York City. (With his writing partner Charles MacArthur, he completed the screenplay for The Unholy Garden in twelve hours.) Hecht won an Oscar for his screenplay for Underworld (1927) and soon after became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the Hollywood screenwriter," and for good reason, for Hecht's accomplishments are extraordinary and include stories, scenarios, and uncredited work on:

• The Front Page (1931)
• Scarface (1932)
• Hallelujah I'm a Bum (1933)
• Twentieth Century (1934)
• The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
• Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
• Gone with the Wind (1939)
• Gunga Din (1939)
• Wuthering Heights (1939)
• His Girl Friday (1940)
• Spellbound (1945)
• The Miracle of the Bells (1948)
• Monkey Business (1952)
• Guys and Dolls (1955)
• A Farewell to Arms (1957)
• Cleopatra (1963)
• Casino Royale (1967)

And many more. Among his genre work, Ben Hecht contributed to The Thing from Another World (1951), Queen from Outer Space (1958), 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), and many more movies of crime, murder, and mystery, including Le spectre vert (1930), a Portuguese release with a French cast and crew.

Ben Hecht left Chicago in 1924 for the city of his birth. From then until the end of his life, he alternated between New York and Hollywood. Hecht died in New York on April 18, 1964. If J.C. Henneberger had hoped to have Hecht in his magazine back in those early days, his hopes would have been dashed even before it went to print, for Ben Hecht became one of the most successful authors of the century and could hardly have written for a penny per word.

It should come as no surprise that Ben Hecht worked on The Thing from Another World (1951). There's plenty of fast talk, snappy patter, and overlapping dialogue. There's even a reporter who turns into a man of action when the situation calls for it. His words close the movie: "Keep watching the skies!"

I can't say whether Queen of Outer Space (1958) lies on the other end of the science fiction spectrum or not. I have never seen it. But the writers--Ben Hecht (outline) and Charles Beaumont (screenplay)--were no slouches. The movie might be worth a look.

Ben Hecht (1894-1964)

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley