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A. Merritt


A. Merritt was a pioneering, and popular, FantasyGenre science fantasy author, who also demonstrated his considerable fictioneering talent with HorrorGenre weird fantasy and MysteryGenre mystery stories. By the 1930s, Merritt's fiction was being listed among the most popular FantasyGenre science fiction stories by pulp readers.

Background

A. MerrittA. Merritt
Born: Jan. 10, 1884
Died: Aug. 21, 1943
Abraham Grace Merritt's day job was as a journalist: first, as a reporter and, later, night city editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, then as a staffer and eventually editor of Hearst Newspapers' The American Weekly, a weekly Sunday newspaper supplement.

Meanwhile, Merritt was writing fiction on the side. His first PulpMagazines short story, "Through the Dragon Glass," was published in AllStory All-Story in the Nov. 24, 1917, issue. Over the next 25 years, Merritt wrote imaginative, popular fiction leading readers into new alternate worlds and introducing them to sympathetic, yet weird, characters.

In 1938, readers of Argosy Argosy magazine picked his novel The Ship of Ishtar as the most popular story ever published in the magazine. His PulpMagazines novelette The Moon Pool was the readers' favorite science fiction story in a survey by GernsbackHugo Hugo Gernsback's WonderStories Wonder Stories.

Merritt also dabbled in other pulp genres, including HorrorGenre weird fantasy ("The Woman of the Wood," which appeared in WeirdTales Weird Tales) and MysteryGenre mystery (Seven Footprints to Satan, which was serialized in Argosy Argosy-All-Story).

His work influenced WilliamsonJack Jack Williamson and succeeding pulp fictioneers.
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