Corwin F. Stickney
(October 10, 1921 – November 15, 1998)
Corwin Francis Stickney, a teenaged New Jersey fan active in the 1930s, published the fanzine Science Fantasy Correspondent with Willis Conover, later taking it over and retitling it Amateur Correspondent. He had been a prozine letterhack. (“We seldom have a letter from so young a reader,” Amazing Stories editor T. O'Connor Sloane wrote in response to a loc from Stickney in the February 1936 issue, calling the 13-year-old “an excellent critic.”)
Sam Moskowitz wrote in The Immortal Storm:
The fifteen-year-old Stickney was apparently markedly above average in intelligence. He had struck up an association with Frank S. Bogert, an elderly printer in Belleville, New Jersey, and in exchange for setting type for the latter was permitted to print his Science-Fantasy Correspondent for the cost of its paper.
Throughout the entire life of his fanzine, Stickney made only one typo, according to SaM, and that one in the first issue.
In 1937, he put out a 25-copy booklet of 10 H. P. Lovecraft poems. This caused August Derleth to threaten to sue him, in spite of the fact that Lovecraft had given permission to Stickney to publish some of the poems, and that part of the contents were already in the public domain because of previous fanzine publication.
Stickney doesn’t seem to have been active fannishly after that, but he was around long enough (or possibly became a revenant) to be listed on the member rolls of Loncon, the 1957 Worldcon.
He wrote a little short fiction, with at least one story, “Intelligence Factor,” in the prozines (Science-Fiction Plus, December 1953).
| Person | 1921—1998 |
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