The Best of Murray Leinster by John J. Pierce

Mencken often used at the Smart Set magazine, where Jenkins began writing fillers and epigrams and then poems, sketches, and stories. He also wrote as Major Owen Hatteras, a house name that H. He wrote under numerous pseudonyms, including Murray Leinster, William Fitzgerald, Louisa Carter Lee, and Jean Farquar. He sent some of his ideas to the American military others ended up in his stories.Īlthough his fame derived mostly from his science fiction writing, Jenkins published in various popular genres, including romance, mystery, adventure, westerns, and general interest, in both pulp and slick magazines throughout his life. Jenkins also was an avid inventor who held two patents for a front projection system for motion picture special effects. They had four children, Mary, Elizabeth, Wenllian, and Jo-an. From then on he supported himself solely by writing, except during World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), later quipping that during his career “I only starved twice.” Jenkins married Mary Mandola of Greenwich Village, New York in 1921. He quit in 1917 to devote himself full-time to writing. After his family moved to New Jersey, Jenkins worked as an office boy and then as a bookkeeper for the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark. A Confederate veteran sent him five dollars after reading it. Lee, in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot in 1913. He published his first work, a tribute to Confederate general Robert E. Although he had no formal education beyond the eighth grade, he was a voracious reader with a fascination for science and technology. William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born on June 16, 1896, in Norfolk.

Jenkins, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, died in Gloucester in 1975. During the Cold War, Ivan Efremov, a science fiction writer from the Soviet Union, attacked Jenkins’s writing in his story “The Heart of the Serpent” (1959), in which aliens read “First Contact” and judge it to be warmongering. In “Sidewise in Time” (1934), a Fredericksburg professor encounters time shifts and a parallel universe in which the Confederacy won the American Civil War (1861–1865). Jenkins was born in Gloucester County, and some of his stories were set in Virginia. “First Contact” (1945) depicts a tense standoff between two spaceship crews, each fearing the other’s intent. A 1946 story imagined personal computers and a network that closely resembles today’s Internet.

An avid inventor whose gadgets sometimes appeared in his stories, Jenkins wrote about mad scientists, criminal masterminds, alien invasions, and time travel. He published approximately 1,800 stories in more than 150 periodicals and 74 novels and collections in a career that began in 1913 and ended in 1974. He published in several genres, but was best known for his pioneering science fiction writing under the penname of Murray Leinster. Jenkins was one of the most prolific fiction writers of the twentieth century.

The Best of Murray Leinster by John J. Pierce