Mari Wolf

(August 27, 1926 – )

Mari Wolf. From Imagination (March 1952).

Marianita Beatrice Wolf (briefly Graham and Snodgrass; sometimes also given as Marion Wolf), a Los Angeles SF fan and author, ran a fan column, "Fandora's Box" (also the name of her Hollywood apartment), for the prozine Imagination from April 1951 to April 1956. Wolf wrote about SF and fandom, reviewed and ranked fanzines, and interviewed authors.

She doled out egoboo with such heedless abandon that the character called the Giantess in The Enchanted Duplicator was modeled after her.

Fandora's Box was inspired by the "The Club House," column by Rog Phillips (pseudonym of Roger Phillip Graham, Wolf’s later husband) which appeared from 1948 to 1953 in Amazing and later in other SF magazines edited by Ray Palmer.

As of 1950, Wolf was a member of the Outlander Society and the N3F.

Several of Wolf's SF stories appeared in If, including the novella Homo Inferior (November 1953). She was first to use the abbreviation droid for a robot, in her July 1952 debut, "Robots of the World! Arise!"

In an autobiography in the March 1952 Imagination, she wrote that her family spent the first three years of her life in Ecuador and then in Laguna Beach, California. She’d wanted to be a writer since she was 5 years old and discovered SF in high school. She majored in mathematics at UCLA.

Since college, I’ve done various things. I taught dancing for a while. I did some modeling. I spent a lot of time out at the stables. And I kept on reading science fiction. Eventually I became acquainted with Los Angeles fandom and became an Outlander. 

Then I read in Rog Phillips’ Club House in Amazing Stories how much fun science fiction conventions can be, and I made up my mind to go to the one in Portland. 

That was NorWesCon, the 1950 Worldcon. She met Phillips there on September 1, and married him in Chicago the next month; in his own column, he dates it Tuesday, October 24. Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey were their witnesses. The marriage was over by 1955 (a year later, Phillips married another big name fan Honey Wood).

By that time, Mari Wolf was working as a "calculating-machine operator" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She remained active in fandom for several years, attending the 1958 Solacon for example, and wrote a crime paperback, The Golden Frame (1961), but afterwards was not evidently involved in sff.

Earl Terry Kemp said "she gafiated and remarried". That 1961 marriage, to mundane Frank S. Snodgrass, appears to have lasted until at least 1964 based on a voter record naming her Mari W. Snodgrass; no later records using that name have been found. In 1976 she (or they) bought a house in Norco, nicknamed "Horsetown USA", where she lived until a court-appointed conservator sold it for her in 2009.

More Reading and Photographs

• "Introducing the author: Mari Wolf", Imagination March 1952, p. 2 and 76–7
• 1957 photo in The LASFS Album (1966).
• Solacon Final Report (2 MiB PDF; centerfold top middle) contains a small photo of Mari Wolf participating in the "Lysistrata panel"
• Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
• Works at Project Gutenberg.
• Reprint of Wolf’s story “Prejudice” (Destiny Winter 1953–4, with art by Julian May) and a reminiscence about her column by Ted White in Earl Kemp’s e.I #5, 2002 (PDF, HTML)
• “Intelligence Test” by Mari Wolf, Vega 5 (December 1952, p. 4).

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Person

1926—????

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