S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: HAMILTON, Edmond Moore
Aged: 72
Born: October 21, 1904
Where: Youngstown, Ohio
Died: February 1, 1977
Where: Lancaster, California
Interred: Kinsman Cemetery, Kinsman, Ohio
Married: Leigh Brackett
When: December 31, 1946
Awarded: The Jules Verne Award and First Fandom's 'Hall of Fame'
Award.
Edmond Hamilton
"I began to imitate A. Merritt's style out of admiration and found that it sold."
Hamilton was the most prolific of the early pulp pioneers and is often mis-labelled as one of the space opera writers who destroyed worlds. That's way short of the mark. Ed's sense of wonder was limitless and he awed a pre-WWII era teenage fandom that bought his works religiously. Hamilton moved from hack pulp writing to smooth teller of tales, actually taking the space opera a long way toward today's modern form. Ed wrote volumes...we may never find it all...as some of the SF pulps used a lot of raw profanity and still hidden pen names were/are common. No pulp writer sold more stories than Ed Hamilton.
Ed published his first story in Weird Tales in 1926, "The Monster God of Mamurth." Hamilton's work habit was about equally divided between novels and short stories. And an occasional mystery (or murder story) sprung from his pen. Hamilton wrote some excellent SF short work, collected in 1977 as The Best of Edmond Hamilton. He thought his best work was "The Inn Outside the World."
Ed's wife was the equally legendary SF writer, Leigh Brackett. The Hamiltons were from that time period when pros were very active fans and they attended many conventions, serving as Guests of Honor for the World SF Conventions in 1954 and 1959. During the pulp years they lived quietly on a place off the Kinsman-Orangeville Road, se of Kinsman, Ohio. "We lived a while in Los Angeles and then, on a visit back east, decided to realize the perennial writer's dream of a small house way out in the country where we could work undisturbed. We purchased a 130-year old farmhouse in the old Western Reserve of Ohio, and set to work to renovate the venerable wreck. As might be expected, for the next few years we did more renovating than writing. We've finally called it done - and live therein with a few thousand books, a few hundred LP records, a few friendly squirrels who like our attic, and with many near neighbors in the form of woodchucks who like our clover, raccoon who like our sweet-corn, and deer who also like sweet-corn."
But the Hamiltons loved to travel and toured widely, allowing exercise of Edmond's skill in photography and Leigh's interest in things exotic. They occasionally summered in Devon, England, or both going to movie sets where Leigh was modifying her screenplays. They maintained a second residence at Lancaster, CA., due north of Los Angeles and very near the high Mohave Desert. Each would edit major science fiction & fantasy collections for the other, which must have been mutually satisfactory and definitive for both.
"The royalties for my collection,
The Horror on the Asteroid (UK)
were so small I was paid in postage stamps."
PEN NAMES: Alexander Blade, Robert Castle, Hugh Davidson, and Robert Wentworth. They also used these house pen names shared by other writers: Will Garth, S. M. Tenneshaw, and Brett Sterling. A couple other house names were also used for some mystery work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY: E. Hoffmann Price's In Memoriam
OBITUARY: The Warren, Ohio Tribune Chronicle
