Stanley G. Weinbaum
(April 4, 1902 – December 14, 1935)
Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was an SF author whose career was short but influential. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey," was published to great acclaim in July, 1934, but he died eighteen months later.
He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, attended school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, first as a chemical engineering major but later switching to English as his major. He did not graduate because, on a bet, Weinbaum took an exam for a friend. This was later discovered, and he was forced to leave the University in 1923.
He is best known for his groundbreaking SF short story, "A Martian Odyssey," which presented a sympathetic but decidedly non-human alien, Tweel. Even more remarkably, this was his first SF story. Isaac Asimov described the story as a perfect Campbellian SF story, before John W. Campbell. Lester del Rey said that "Weinbaum, more than any other writer, helped to take our field out of the doldrums of the early thirties and into the beginnings of modern science fiction."
He was a member of the Milwaukee Fictioneers.
His SF novels were The New Adam (Ziff Davis Publishing Co., 1939); The Black Flame (Fantasy Press, 1948); The Dark Other [aka The Mad Brain] (Fantasy Publishing Co., 1950); and The Red Peri (Fantasy Press, 1952). Weinbaum occasionally used the pseudonyms of John Jessell and Marge Stanley. The Best of Stanley Weinbaum was published by Ballantine Books in 1974.
Sometime before 1930, when he was a city salesman advertising and selling chemical products. Stanley married Margaret Hawtof. He died of lung cancer. His sister, Helen W. Kasson, completed some of his work.
{Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
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| Person | 1902—1935 |
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