Like Damon Knight, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) began his career in the fantastic as an artist. Of course, he wasn’t known as Beaumont yet but by his real name, Charles Nutt. Horribly teased as a child, he tried to mitigate the name by adding a “Mc” to it. As an artist he was Charles McNutt. His first work appeared in a fanzine/pulp magazine when he was only nineteen.
Beaumont’s art style changed rapidly with practice. The first images he did for William Crawford are cartoony but promising. By the second issue of Fantasy Book, the style is stronger, taking after Virgil Finlay. This similarity got him a gig at Famous Fantastic Mysteries where Finlay reigned as the king of Pulp artists.
Beaumont’s art appeared in three places:
The first two issues of William Crawford’s Fantasy Book:
In the A. E. Van Vogt collection Out of the Unknown, where he shared the illustration work with Roy Hunt:
And in one issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1948:
By twenty-one, McNutt was done. It’s too bad in some ways. In a very short time he became quite a proficient and interesting illustrator. We can only imagine all the late Weird Tales and early SF pictures he would have drawn.
After June 1948, Charles McNutt met and collaborated with a female artist who signed her work “Miss Beaumont”. Charles Nutt legally changed his name after this and became the Charles Beaumont who wrote classic stories like “Free Dirt” and The Twilight Zone episodes like “The Howling Man” and “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”. Beaumont would adapt H. P. Lovecraft to the screen in The Haunted Palace (1963), making it one of the first Cthulhu Mythos films. Sadly, his career was cut short in 1963, when Chuck began to suffer from an mysterious illness that proved to be Alzheimer’s and Pick’s Disease. He died four years later in 1967.
Charles went (years before me) to the same high school as me; his favourite teachers were mine as well. I have a paperback of his first collection signed by him to them, which they gave me. Thanks for this information; I never knew he was an illustrator as well!
His last few Twilight Zone stories were actually done for him by Jerry Sohl; Sohl, Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Ted Sturgeon, and George Clayton Johnson formed a writing group called The Green Hand. Beaumont was dying of that neurological disease and Jerry wrote the scripts to help Beaumont’s wife, not taking credit.
Jerry Sohl was a very good friend, but I only met Ted Sturgeon and none of the other writers.
Informative article. Thank you. Had no idea he was a talented illustrator as well. Wonderful writer, gone too soon.