The Masters of Fantasy by Neil Austin

“The Masters of Fantasy” by Neil Austin was a biography feature that ran in Famous Fantastic Mysteries from August 1947 to April 1950. In all, Austin did seventeen portraits with informational blurbs about the authors. It is interesting from the POV of the 21st Century as to which authors have risen or fallen since Austen applauded them at the end of the Pulp era. Famous Fantastic Mysteries (along with Fantastic Novels and A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine) made their money on reprinting the classics of fantastic literature (with wonderful new illustrations by Virgil Finlay or Lawrence Sterne Stevens) rather than producing new material. Since this was the case, it made sense to promote the authors of old in such a feature.

Neil Austin was an active fan artist. He did covers and illustrations for Fantasy Book, Fantasy Advertiser and Fantastic Worlds. one of the better fan publications. “Fantasy” as a label in the 1930s and 1940s meant all of fantastic literature (Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror). This is reflected in Austin’s choices of authors. Placing Edgar Rice Burroughs next to Arthur Machen is not a problem for fans of the 1940s. It is only in our specialized paperback bestseller world that such definitions become problematic. Fantasy of any kind was hard to find so fans were not picky. (I remember having a similar attitude towards TV and movies in the pre-Star Wars 1970s. You tried to watch it all.)

Howard Philips Lovecraft (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1947)

Lovecraft seems like a no-brainer in 2022, but in 1947 he had been dead for ten years. Thanks to Donald Wandrei and August Derleth and Arkham House, he had not been forgotten. Today he is the acknowledged “Second Poe” and the top Horror writer of the 20th Century. The Cthulhu Mythos has helped in keeping all things Lovecraftian commercially active.

Abraham Merritt (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1947)

A. Merritt was huge in his day. He inspired so many who came after him including Lovecraft, Jack Williamson, (and the Big Four) Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett. Only Edgar Rice Burroughs can be said to have been more influential. Today, Merritt is more for selective tastes. Baird Searles et al. in Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction (1979) says of him:

Abraham Merritt’s works seem to leave no one neutral. The lush, art-noveau prose and classic adventure plots of his epitomal “scientific romances” are hard to take for certain modern readers, especially those of the nuts and bolts school of science fiction, but the rise of the romantic strain in s-f in the past decade has won him a whole new host of admirers.

I suppose that make me one of those romantics who like him. As Robertson Davies would call it: he’s fruitcaky. (Yes, I also like fruit cake.)

Robert Williams Chambers (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947)

R. W. Chambers is famous for one work in particular, The King in Yellow, which Lovecraft dove-tailed into the Cthulhu Mythos. He did write other fantasies but none has proven as popular. He abandoned Fantasy for bestseller money and historical novels. You can’t balme him. Fantasy paid very little for most writers.

Sydney Fowler Wright (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948)

Sydney Fowler Wright is a literary writer who occasionally stooped to writer Fantasy. His reputation is similar to Philip Wylie. He wrote fantastic material that mainstream readers would read, especially about robots.

Algernon Blackwood (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1948)

Algernon Blackwood became known as “The Ghost Man” for the many ghost stories he wrote and read on the BBC Radio and television. He is one of my favorites because of his connection to Canada and the strange Northerns he wrote. I personally don’t think he was as good as M. R. James but still in the top tier. His stories are frequently reprinted in Horror collections to this day.

Herbert George Wells (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1948)

H. G. Wells is considered the Father of Modern Science Fiction (as opposed to Jules Verne). He set so many tropes in place, predicted several real world events, and was very fun to read when he was young. If you look at the monsters found in The Great Book of Movie Monsters by Stacy and Syvertsen (1985), a third can be traced back to Herbert George.

Stephen Vincent Benet (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1948) with William Rose Benet

This one surprised me. Isn’t that the guy who wrote “Daniel Webster”? He is infact the author of John Brow’s Body (1929), The Devil and Dabiel Webster (1936) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). He won the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1929. Who knew? All I remember is The Charlie Daniels Band and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1948)

Edgar Rice Burroughs is without doubt the most influential Science Fiction author of the first half of the 20th Century. Science Fiction before him was often men in labs talking about ideas. ERB gave us action, color, adventure. Just about every writer I know or talk to points to ERB as the gateway drug that pulled them into fantasy at the age of twelve. He has surely survived the Hundred Year Test better than his detractors.

Arthur Machen (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1948)

Machen was one of Lovecraft’s influences so he gets more attention than he might otherwise. He was big in the Yellow Nineties (with his “The Great God Pan”) and then famous again after the Battle of Mons. Anthologists like David Hartwell brought him back in the 1990s. Machen has his place, though I wonder how many actually read him?

Matthew Phipps Shiel (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1949)

M. P. Shiel is one of the problematic ones. Like H. P. Lovecraft he is openly racist. In 1914 he was jailed for child molestation. There is not much to like about the guy outside of his writing The Purple Cloud (1901), a classic that H. P. Lovecraft mentions in The Supernatural Horror in Literature. I find his horror stories largely unreadable, though his collection of weird mysteries about Prince Zaleski less so.

John Taine (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1949)

John Taine (Eric Temple Bell) is one of those early SF writers that hasn’t held up over time. A mathematician, he wrote several books on Math. His best remembered novels are The Greatest Adventure (1929) and The Time Stream (1931) which he did for Hugo Gernsback.

Lord Dunsany (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1949)

Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) could be famous for so many things. He was a top playwright in his day. He was an actual English baron. He fought in the Second Boer War and WWI. He did all that and wrote many great short stories of Fantasy. His work formed what a fantasy tale looked like outside of a novel (E. R. Eddison, George MacDonald and William Morris being the biggest writers of those.) His influence on Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and many other Pulpsters was key. His works were published in the Ballantine Fantasy Series in the 1970s and haven’t really disappeared since.

Clark Ashton Smith (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1949)

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the younger writers chosen here. He lived to the 1960s. By 1949 he had written most of what he was going to do for Weird Tales. After Lovecraft and Howard died, CAS wrote less and less and finally retired to his Californian hills to carve the soft local stone into intriguing fantastic statuettes. Some critics today consider him the “the best of the Weird Tales writers”. Before the Pulps he had had a growing reputation in the California poetry crowd (that included George Sterling and Ambrose Bierce). The Great Depression forced him to turn to fiction writing. I think he is a little like A. Merritt. You either love him or hate him. I love his ornate Fantasies and poetic style.

Raymond Bradbury (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1949)

This one surprises me the most. Not that Bradbury isn’t wonderful but in 1949 he had yet to write the stories that would propel him to fame.  The Illustrated Man (1951), Farenheit 451 (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), I Sing the Body Electric (1969) and “The Fog Horn” in The Saturday Evening Post, June 23, 1951. What he had published was The Martian Chronicles (1946) and Dark Carnival (1947), both major collections of stories largely from Pulps like Planet Stories and Weird Tales. Austin was completely right to choose him. Our boy Ray was going places.

Edgar Allan Poe (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949)

Poe’s reputation was secure before Famous Fantastic Mysteries even started. Readers often think of him as “that Horror guy”. Which is only partly true. Poe was so much more. He created the detective story (that A. Conan Doyle would crib for Sherlock Holmes) at the same time that he created the ghostbreaker trope, Scooby-Doo and all. And that was with one story. He was also an early Science Fiction writer. His unfinished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1841) received sequels by Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft.

Olaf Stapledon (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1950)

Olaf Stapledon wrote circles around most SF writers. He isn’t as instantly recognizable as H. G. Wells but he was equally important. His sprawling novels like Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are rich mines of ideas that lesser writers would borrow. His massive style books do not lend themselves to movies so he has not flourished like Wells.

Montague Rhodes James (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1950)

James was simply the best ghost story writer of his day. We get the word “Jamesian” from him. (Don’t tell Henry James, he thinks it’s since adjective.) So many of the writers who sat around the Eton don as he read his Christmas story went on to pen tales of their own. E. G. Swain, A. C. Benson and many others took James’ tales as templates. And why wouldn’t they? They are so creepy. James did not invent the ghost story. He was born in 1862, around the same time Charles Dickens was publishing Christmas stories in his All The Year Round. Hosts of writers, many of them women, were busy writing tales of phantoms to fill the English magazines of the day. So M. R. James inherited the mantle from writers like Charlotte Riddell, Rhoda Broughton and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. James took the form and perfected it into the concise and nasty little tale. He even got to write a story for Queen Mary’s doll-house.

Conclusion

I don’t know why the series stopped at seventeen. Mary Gnaedinger may have asked for no more portraits or Neil Austin may have stopped producing them. Some authors I would have thought to see here are John Wyndham and Robert E. Howard and, from the ladies, Edith Nesbit, Francis Stevens and C. L. Moore, for sure. We can only imagine what other authors Neil Austin thought worthy of the title of “Masters of Fantasy”.