S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: CAMPBELL, John Wood, Jr.
Aged: 61
Born: June 8, 1910
Where: Newark, New Jersey
Died: July 11, 1971
Where: Mountainside, New Jersey
Interred: Cremated
Married: Dona Stuart
When: 1931
Married 2: Margaret Winter
When: 1950
Awarded: 9 Hugos for Best Professional
Magazine, Astounding & Analog and the 1968 E. E. Smith Memorial
Award for Imaginative Contribution (the Skylark Award). One of 1996's
inaugural writers inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Also honored by the naming of a crater on Mars.
John W. Campbell, Jr.
"Your story is based on an original idea,
but don't you think it can be improved by..."
The man who wrote "Who Goes There?" or aka The Thing.
Attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Duke University, where he graduated with a degree in physics. But during the Depression, Campbell turned to writing.
Campbell made his mark on Science Fiction as the unswerving "Science" Fiction editor of Astounding, beginning in 1937, and, a later version, Analog. Anthony Boucher White said of Campbell, "No other man has had so profound an influence on the development of modern science fiction as John W. Campbell."
Campbell was credited with nurturing a stable of writers that included Heinlein, Van Vogt, Sturgeon, de Camp, and Garrett. His education in science always demanding that same item in stories that he would accept for publication, forcing his writers away from fantasy.
Today, as Astounding becomes dated and fades into the past, Campbell is noted for his roll as 'finish carpenter' on L. Ron Hubbard's work with Dianetics. Campbell was intimately involved with the creation of Dianetics in 1949, so much so that his wife, Dona, said it was the last straw and departed the marriage. Campbell was consumed by the belief that Dianetics worked and timed Astounding's article "Dianetics" in May of 1950 to co-incide with Hermitage House's release of the book Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health, by Hubbard. (All of this finally came to a head in the mid 1950s when Morey Bernstein's The Search for Bridey Murphy was published and the psychiatric community finally took a serious look at hypnotic regression, with its attendant dangers and abuses...and results.)
Campbell was also a habitual photographer and carried a camera(s) to any function. The repository of these negatives and photographs is unknown.
Thumbnail taken 1957 World Con in London.
PEN NAMES: Karl van Campen, Arthur McCann, Don A. Stuart
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY: Science Fiction Writers, Scribners 1982
OBITUARY: New York Times, July 13, 1971, p36.
