Name: PANGBORN, Edgar W. Aged: 66
Born: February 25, 1909 Where: New York, New York
Died: February 1, 1976 Where: Woodstock, NY
Interred: _ _ _
Married: _ _ _ When: _ _ _
Awarded: International Fantasy Award in 1955 for A Mirror for Observers.

Attended Harvard for a couple of years and tried the New England Conservatory of Music, but then struggled through the Depression. Edgar was drafted in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army until 1946 in the Pacific theater. Pangborn's mother, Georgia Wood Pangborn, had been a writer of ghost stories, so after the war, Edgar decided to follow her lead and chose writing as a career.

Pangborn became a broad mainstream writer, working in many fields. His first published work dated back to 1930 but Edgar only began writing SF in 1951 with the publication of "Angel's Egg," a novelette, for Galaxy. Pangborn's first SF novel was published in 1953, West of the Sun. After 1954's Mirror for Observers, Edgar wandered away from SF for a decade, returning in 1964 with Davy, a post nuclear-war story. Pangborn became fascinated by Man's possible variations for recovery from a nuclear disaster and wrote several short stories on this theme, all holding to a common projected history (what we now call a thread). The last Pangborn novel, 1975's The Company of Glory, held to this struggle-to-survive plot. The short works were gathered together by Roger Elwood in the Continuum series, 1974-5.

Kenneth Spell reports that Pangborn's personal papers have been acquired by Boston University, Mugar Memorial Library, Special Collections, 771 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.

PEN NAMES: Bruce Harrison

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

WWII DATA: Army SN 31147295, Edgar W. Pangborn, res Somerset county, Maine. Enlisted Bangor, ME, on Aug 27, 1942. Pvt. Born 1909, New York. 2 years of college. Single.

Send relevant email to George C. Willick