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- Charles Williams was born in San Angelo, Texas, and grew up there and in New Mexico. He attended Brownsville High School in Texas through the tenth grade. In the United States Merchant Marine, from 1929 to 1939, he served as a radio operator. Williams joined the U.S. Navy during World War II, and between 1939 and 1950 worked as an electronics inspector, a wireless operator, a radar technician, and a radio service engineer. In the course of these careers he lived in Peru, Arizona, Florida, and Switzerland. Williams married Lasca Foster in 1939; they had one daughter, Alison. His first novel, Hill Girl, was rejected by several publishers before the Fawcett publishing company picked it up in 1950 for their line of Gold Medal paperback originals. Williams had beginner's luck; it sold, according to one source, 1,226,890 copies. He went on to publish 21 more novels, gaining enough attention as a member of the "Gold Medal" writers that he was hired to script a few films, including his own The Wrong Venus, filmed as Don't Just Stand There (1968), and Hell Hath No Fury, filmed as _Hot Spot, The (1990/I)_. Williams seems to have been familiar with the saying, "God made the country, man made the city, and the Devil made the small town." His hard-boiled thrillers are often set in the hot, humid, mosquito- and snake-infested hamlets of the Gulf Coast and South Florida in the 1950s and 1960s. His more famous later novels take place on boats or ships on the open sea. He also wrote some very funny comedies, including The Diamond Bikini (1956) and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959), in which a boy chronicles the shenanigans of his scheming uncle. However, Williams's thrillers more usually featured guys who think they can get rich quick when they are seduced by the deceitful promises of beautiful and dangerous dames, or honest, likable types who find themselves in deadly circumstances but are determined to see justice done at last. Although fourteen of his novels were optioned or adapted for film -- the most successful being Dead Calm (1989) -- he received little critical attention in the U.S. However, his books were enormously popular in France, where nearly all were either translated or filmed. His wife Lasca died in the early 1970s of cancer, and Charles went to live alone in a trailer on the border between California and Oregon. The weather there depressed him; he was too in love with sun and sea. His personal finances declined as the popularity of hard-boiled thrillers began to wane. In 1975, he committed suicide. Williams's reputation lives on, stronger than ever, among aficionados of the hard-boiled crime novel, and even his battered paperbacks can sell for $100 or more.
- Willard Huntington Wright was born to Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright on October 15, 1887, in Charlottesville. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College, and Harvard University. He also studied art in Munich and Paris, an apprenticeship that led to a job as literary and art critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 1912 to 1914, he edited "The Smart Set," a New York literary magazine, and continued writing as a critic and journalist until 1923, when he became ill from overwork. His doctor confined him to bed because of a heart ailment for more than two years. In frustration, he began collecting thousands of volumes of crime and detection. In 1926, all this work paid off with the publication of his first "S.S. Van Dine" novel, "The Benson Murder Case." He went on to write 11 more, and his aristocratic amateur sleuth, Philo Vance (who shares a love of aesthetics like Wright), was so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. He moved into a penthouse and enjoyed spending his fortune in a style similar to that of elegant Philo.
- Donald K. Slayton was one of the original Mercury project astronauts, but he was grounded by an irregular heartbeat. He was chief of the NASA astronaut office and director of flight crew operations. In 1975 he flew on the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. He died in 1993 at his home.
- John Creasey was the seventh of nine children born to Joseph Creasey, a coachmaker, and Ruth Creasey. They were very poor, and John suffered a bout of polio, resulting in his not learning to walk until he was six. He was ten when a schoolmaster suggested he had a gift for writing. John left school at the age of fourteen, trying to become a professional writer, while his family mocked him for his dreams and his employers generally fired him for neglecting his work. For 14 years Creasey was unable to sell a story, in the process collecting 743 rejection slips. His first sale was the tenth novel he completed: "Seven Times Seven" (1932). He wanted to support himself as a writer, but he did the math: a mystery writer may publish two books a year without overcrowding the marketplace, and he needed to sell more than that, so he began to use pseudonyms. Among the ones he used were Gordon Ashe; Margaret Cooke; M.E. Cooke; Henry St. John Cooper; Norman Deane; Elise Fecamps; Robert Caine Frazier; Patrick Gill; Michael Halliday; Charles Hogarth (with Ian Bowen); Brian Hope; Colin Hughes; Kyle Hunt; Abel Mann; Peter Manton; J.J. Marric; James Marsden; Richard Martin; Anthony Morton; Ken Ranger; William K. Reilly; Tex Riley; and Jeremy York.
An incredibly prolific writer who turned out work at an astonishing rate, he earned riches and fame. He purchased a 42-room manor in England and a Rolls-Royce. He dabbled in politics and contributed to refugee work and famine relief. He was married to Margaret Elizabeth Cooke for four years, to Evelyn Fudge for 29 years, to Jeanne Williams briefly, and to Diana Hamilton Farrell a month before his death. He had three children. He founded the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain and was also an officer of the Mystery Writers of America. In 1946 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). - Writer
- Actor
- Art Department
Powers has lived in southern California since 1959. He graduated from California State University at Fullerton with a B.A. in English in 1976; the same year he published his first two novels, "The Skies Discrowned" and "Epitaph in Rust." Powers, who takes more time and care writing novels than his fans would like, went on to sell "The Drawing of the Dark" (1979, a supernatural fantasy about King Arthur and beer-drinking), "The Anubis Gates" (1983, time-travel fantasy featuring Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, and winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo), "Dinner at Deviant's Palace" (1987, a science fiction post-apocalypse novel and winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award), "The Stress of Her Regard" (1989, a vampire novel featuring English Romantic poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron), the Fisher-King, Tarot-card-haunted trilogy of "Last Call" (1992, winner of the World Fantasy Award), "Expiration Date" (1996), and "Earthquake Weather" (1997), and "Declare" (2001, a supernatural spy novel featuring Kim Philby). A very accessible writer, he has often taught the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University and the Writers of the Future Workshop, and chats regularly with his fans on the Tim Powers discussion list on yahoogroups.- Gregory Benford was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1941. He received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and attended the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1967. He spent the next four years at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist. In 1971 he joined University of California, Irvine, as a teacher, becoming a full professor of physics in 1979. Benford was always a fan of science fiction and his first published story, "Stand In" (1965), won second place in a contest at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Deeper Than the Darkness (1970), dealt with alien contact, but the novel which established his reputation was Timescape (1980), winner of both a Nebula and a Campbell Memorial Award. Other novels include thrillers Artifact (1985), Chiller (as by Sterling Blake, 1993), Cosm (1998), and Eater (2000). Benford has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and MIT, and served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. In 1989, he was host and scriptwriter for the television series, "A Galactic Odyssey", which described physics and astronomy from the perspective of the galaxy's evolution, an eight-part series produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.
In 1995 he received the Lord Prize for achievements in the sciences. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He worked on long-term marking of the major U.S. nuclear waste site (how do you warn people 10,000 years from now that the land used for radioactive waste is dangerous?), helped design the message to fly on the 1998 Cassini mission to Saturn, and participated in the planning and writing of text for the CD placed aboard the 1999 Russian Mars lander. He was Guest of Honor at the 1999 Worldcon in Australia. - Greg was born in San Diego on August 20th, 1951, to Wilma M. and Dale F. Bear. He sold his first short story at the age of fifteen to the magazine Famous Science Fiction and his first novel, Hegira, appeared in 1979. One of Bear's most famous stories is "Blood Music", which won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. Another short story, "Dead Run", was adapted by Alan Brennert for the second Twilight Zone television show. He worked as a freelance journalist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he covered all the Voyager planetary encounters for the San Diego Union, as a film commentator for the Los Angeles Times, as a book reviewer for the San Diego Union Book Review supplement, as a bookseller and as lecturer for the San Diego City Schools. He was a founding member of ASFA, the Association of Science Fiction Artists. In the 1980s, Bear served on the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy and as science and speculations advisor for the pilot episode of the Amblin/Universal TV production _Earth 2 (1994) (TV)_. Married to Astrid Anderson (daughter of Poul Anderson) in 1983. They have a son, Erik (born September 1986) and a daughter, Alexandra (born January 1990). His science fiction often draws on his knowledge of biology and anthropology.
- Composer
- Music Department
- Writer
An important and influential American composer, Partch grew up in the frontier territory of southern Arizona. His parents encouraged his musical ability and he learned to play wind instruments, strings, and piano. He understood what music theater could be when he observed the Beijing Opera in San Francisco's Chinatown when he was 13; he began composing his own melodies a year later. In his teens Partch played the piano well enough to accompany silent films in Albuquerque. During his twenties he developed the foundations of his difficult ideas about intonation and what he called corporality and began to write his notable book, Genesis of a Music. In 1930, Partch burned everything he had composed up to that time. With the help of a financial grant, Partch was able in 1934 to study the history of intonation at the British Museum, but he returned to an America in the throes of the Great Depression and wandered as a hobo for eight years. He gained professional attention after completing "The Wayward," a series of instrumental ensembles. With a research fellowship in the mid-1940s at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he invented two chromelodeons and four pitched idiophones. He continued to invent during the rest of his career. His most famous works are "Oedipus" (1951), "The Bewitched" (1955), "Revelation in the Courthouse Park" (1960), "Water! Water!" (1961), and "Delusion of the Fury" (1966). In 1956, Partch met the percussionist and conductor Danlee Mitchell. They collaborated for the rest of his life. Partch spent his last years in Encinitas, near San Diego. After his death, his invented instruments were preserved at Montclair State University in New Jersey.- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Tim Sullivan attended John Bapst Regional High School in Bangor, Maine (the same school from which Tabitha Bruce, Stephen King's wife, graduated).
Earning a degree in literature from Florida Atlantic University, he moved to southern California in 1988, where he lived for the next twelve years, and edited a horror anthology for Avon Books, Tropical Chills (1988). He also published his first novel, Destiny's End, in 1988. This science fiction novel was followed by The Parasite War in 1989, The Martian Viking in 1991, and Lords of Creation in 1992, and another horror anthology, Cold Shocks (Avon, 1991), among other books.
Sullivan began his career in film by starring in Somtow Sucharitkul's The Laughing Dead (1989), in a charged performance as Father O'Sullivan, who becomes possessed by a Mayan god of death. Throughout the 1990s he scripted and acted in several micro-budget science fiction and horror movies, most notably Twilight of the Dogs (1995) and Hollywood Mortuary (2000), galvanating the delightful script by Ron Ford as actor-turned-zombie Pratt Borokov, a thinly disguised Boris Karloff.
In 2000, Sullivan left Hollywood for South Florida. In 2003, he moved in to live with librarian/science fiction critic Fiona Kelleghan in South Miami, Florida, where he continued to write fiction. He left Florida in 2019.- In college, Knox Burger was the editor of "The Cornell Widow" during fall 1942 and spring 1943. He left college in April 1943 to join the Army. In the service, he contributed freelance reportage, fiction and humor to "Yank," the Army Weekly, 1943-1944. While serving with a B-29 bomb squadron in the Marianas, he covered a number of missions over Japan, and was transferred to the "Yank" Saipan bureau late summer 1945 just before the Japanese surrender. He moved north to Tokyo, where he was, for a few months, the editor of the Far East edition of Yank, and wrote numerous stories about the occupation.
After the war, he did a brief stint at the Harvard graduate school, selling occasional fiction and articles to national magazines. In 1947, Burger was hired by "Collier's," and became its fiction editor in 1948. In 1951, he left "Collier's" to edit books - mostly suspense novels - for Dell. After nine years there, he spent 1960-1970 doing the same thing for Fawcett Publications. Among the writers he worked with during those 20 years were Kurt Vonnegut, John D. MacDonald, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, Horace McCoy, Walter Tevis, MacKinlay Kantor, Morris West and Louis L'Amour. In April, 1970, he established, in partnership with his wife, writer and sculptor Kitty Sprague, a literary agency (Knox Burger Associates), setting up in the basement of the brownstone on Washington Square in which they lived. In the spring of 2000, he merged his agency with the Harold Ober agency.