S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: BESTER, Alfred
Aged: 74
Born: December 18, 1913
Where: New York, New York
Died: September 30, 1987
Where: Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Interred: _ _ _
Married: Rolly Goulko
When: September 16, 1936
Awarded: Hugo Award for The Demolished Man (1953 Novel); and the SFWA's 1987 Grand Master (posthumous).
Alfred Bester
"...writing can't be taught; it can be mastered only through trial and error, and the more errors the better. Youngsters have a lot of damned bad writing to get out of their systems before they can find their way."
After growing up on Manhattan Island, Alfred Bester attended the University of Pennsylvania where he sold several short stories to Thrilling Wonder Stories in the early 1940s. He then embarked on a career as a script er for comics, radio, and (later) television. Bester was also a librettist, having studied music in college. While doing this, Bester's day job was working on such classic characters as Batman, Nick Carter, Charlie Chan, Tom Corbett, The Shadow, and Superman. Bester wrote the original Green Lantern oath and created the villains, Solomon Grundy and Vandal Savage.
In the 1950s, after a bummer of a career turn in television, Bester returned to prose, publishing a number of short stories, "Fondly Fahrenheit," and two brilliant novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. In the late 1950s, Alfred wrote travel articles for Holiday magazine and eventually became their senior literary editor, where he remained until the magazine ceased publication in the 1970s. In 1974, Bester returned to writing science fiction.
After his death, Alfred Bester was awarded the honorary title of Grandmaster by his peers from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
"Gully Foyle is my name.
Terra is my nation.
Deep space my dwelling place
The stars, my destination."
(An alteration of Kipling.)
PEN NAMES: John Lennox
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY: Science Fiction Writers, Scribners 1982
OBITUARY:
