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The acclaimed and unforgettable true story of offbeat intellect and pioneering paranormal investigator Charles Fort--in paperback for the first time.
Here is the seminal biography of one of the most fascinating and polarizing figures in all of Americana: Charles Fort (1874-1932), "the mad genius of the Bronx," "the enfant terrible of science," and the groundbreaking visionary who shaped our modern view of the paranormal.
Theodore Dreiser called Fort "the most fascinating literary figure since Poe." H.G. Wells called him "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers." No one was neutral about Charles Fort. Fort was a virtuoso at assembling records of bizarre, haunting, strange, and inexplicable anomalies for which science could not account.
Like no other book, Jim Steinmeyer's brilliant and celebrated biography takes you down the rabbit hole and into the strange life of an outsider genius.
- Sales Rank: #1922818 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-02
- Released on: 2016-02-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Ben Hecht saw iconoclastic author Fort (1874–1932) as an inspired clown who thumbed his nose at science as well as religion, and Fort's imaginative books exerted a strong influence on science fiction, notably novelist Eric Frank Russell. Stage magic historian Steinmeyer (Hiding the Elephant) captures Fort's wry humor, skepticism and wildest notions. Surviving fragments of Fort's unpublished autobiography illuminate his strict Albany, N.Y., childhood. In 1892, Fort became a New York City reporter and editor before his world travels and 1896 marriage. He was befriended by Theodore Dreiser, who shepherded Fort's short stories and first novel into print. Fort also pored through diverse journals to document the paranormal and anomalies rejected by the scientific establishment. Shoe boxes packed with 40,000 slips of paper served as a basis for The Book of the Damned (1919), which saw print because Dreiser threatened to leave his publisher unless the company also published Fort. As more compilations of oddities appeared, Fort developed a cult following, and the so-called Forteans issued journals long after their leader's death. Steinmeyer has emerged from the archives with a wonderful, prismatic portrait of the man who once wrote, To this day, it has not been decided if I am a humorist or a scientist. 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Fort is generally remembered, when he is, as a crank’s crank and a skeptical satirist, but Steinmeyer seems to argue for a more nuanced view; after all, Fort greatly influenced conspiracy maven Robert Anton Wilson, among other notables. Relying heavily on Fort’s correspondence, Steinmeyer details Fort’s relationship with Theodore Dreiser, who served as Fort’s champion and protector, a post necessitated by Fort’s far-reaching criticism and contrarian reactions to the thoughts and writings of other luminaries of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In his career, Fort wrote about victims of spontaneous combustion, introduced the concept of teleportation, and indulged in conspiracy theories and UFO yarns. Crank or delineator of modern concepts of the supernatural, he is a figure worthy of rediscovery. Esteemed not only by Dreiser, Fort was also dismissed by the New York Times and called a damnable bore by H. G. Wells, thus achieving a certain balance of critical appraisal in his own time. Steinmeyer’s comprehensive work may allow readers to draw their own conclusions and certainly will afford them much entertainment. --Mike Tribby
Review
"This is how biographies should be written: Steinmeyer is the ideal host, introducing us to a fascinating stranger, and sliding into the background...Here is a storyteller with a glint in his eye. Pull up a chair, you won't be disappointed." --Mark Stafford, Times of London
"An engrossing biography." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Perceptive and entertaining." --Ed Park, Los Angeles Times
"Steinmeyer is a gifted biographer, an elegant and unobtrusive author who shows us an entirely fascinating, shy, and witty man, a 20th-century original. This book is not to be missed." --Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal
"Steinmeyer conjures up his subject's world with wit and empathy, and subtly tracks the events that formed Fort's singular character. The man emerges as eccentric, funny, self-effacing and contradictory. Even the most devoted skeptic will enjoy his company." --Harry Pearson, The Daily Mail
"Fort can easily be lampooned as the man who wrote about rains of frogs, but as Jim Steinmeyer emphasizes in this intriguing biography, he trod a narrow tightrope between belief and skepticism. His life, as graphically portrayed in this book, was often frustrated and unfulfilled. But the legacy he left makes the world a brighter place: paradoxically, both saner and sillier." --David V. Barrett, The Independent
"While American history has relegated Fort to the same curiosity file he so deliberately plumbed, Fort's influence has outstretched his literary contributions. Steinmeyer conjures both the image and mind of Fort in such a way as to mirror Fort's own writings. In doing so, Steinmeyer offers readers a psychological profile of Fort, as well as a glimpse into the culture and history that birthed the supernatural interests of our nation." --Michael Mason, Tulsa World
"Steinmeyer captures Fort's wry humor, skepticism and wildest notions. He has emerged from the archives with a wonderful, prismatic portrait. --Publishers Weekly
"This odd, unique character emerges fully rounded in Jim Steinmeyer's fascinating, sympathetic biography." --Richard Lingeman, author of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey
"A colorful portrait of an offbeat character." --Kirkus Reviews
"A delightful book." --Robert Ito, Los Angeles Magazine
"A jolly biography." --Damian Thompson, London Telegraph
"Steinmeyer has produced a meticulously researched, marvelously readable window on the life of this extraordinary man. Was he a genius or a crank? Fort's message is that we should not always seek solutions, because there might be none. That is Steinmeyer's verdict on the man himself." --Andrew Crumey, The Scotsman
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Riding on a comet...
By Mark Newbold
At last a major biography worthy of the man who introduced us to the truly amazing and inexplicable world we inhabit. Not since Damon Knight's 1970 bio has Fort been given his due. Fort came from an odd childhood of upper class indulgence and Dickensian cruelty perpetuated by his father. Fort's personal individuation was one of rebellion against social norms and mindless restrictions leading him to an "on the road" existence of travel, train yards, and down and outs from the backroads of America to cattle ships to Britain.
Fort was Bohemia's bohemian who struggled as a newspaper reporter, starving novelist and hermit in a domestic life surrounded by his devoted wife and research notes. Theodore Drieser was the champion that finally realized the unique genius possessed by Fort and supported him with unwaivering friendship through the remainder of Fort's short but prolific life.
But did he "invent" the supernatural as alleged by the title? Like an eccentric Zen master, Fort directly pointed at the documented realities that intrude into a well ordered empirical universe with distinctly uncomfortable implications. Continuing with the zen metaphor, Fort's "stick that heals" was one of curiosity and doubt. He had possessed a healthy minded agnosticism that was interested in everything because everything is interesting. Rather than "invent" Fort more accurately precipitated what has become known as the supernatural. Among the phenomena he documented were aerial phenonmena later to be called UFO's, vanishing lands, people, vessels and mysterious falls of substances that should not fall upon us are now pillars of the supernatural that continue to baffle and delight.
Fort was a pioneer of an art and/or science that provided us with a lens to view the curious and wonderful world around us in ways not dreamed of in our philosophy. Mr. Steinmeyer, an established writer of magical wonders, is to be thanked for this work that brings the enigmatic Charles Fort to a new generation of readers and potential forteans. Highly recommended.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
An Engaging Portrait of a Difficult Figure
By Rob Hardy
If you have a taste for giant lights in the sky or in the ocean, flying ships "shaped like a Mexican cigar", or secret polar civilizations; or especially, if you want to know more about how rain could come down colored red, black, or yellow, or could include a storm of eels or pebbles or frogs, then Charles Fort is your man. And if you want explanations, you might find it satisfactory that Fort instructs about the blood that dripped from the sky, "... our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages. - Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans..." Fort gets high points for curiosity, and no points for explication, but ninety years after his strange ideas were first put in print, his name is still known by students of the paranormal, whether the name be reviled or praised. In _Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural_ (Tarcher / Penguin), Jim Steinmeyer has given a jolly story of this remarkably strange man. Steinmeyer has written about various aspects of the history of magic, and he designs magic illusions for famous magicians, but this is an appreciative, no-nonsense biography, quite anomalously fitting for a subject who surrounded himself with at least some nonsensical tales taken as fact.
Fort was born in 1874, and grew up in Albany, N.Y. His father was a grocer, a dandy, and a bully, and following a terrible row at home when he was eighteen, Fort left home for good to see the world. When he returned, he started writing stories for magazines, often in the popular vein of O. Henry. He had some success, got some stories published, but the pay was small. He was saved artistically by none other than the author of _An American Tragedy_, Theodore Dreiser, who became his best friend. It is strange that the dour Dreiser, famous for naturalistic and pessimistic fiction, should have admired Fort's stories, but when Fort began working on his strange metaphysics, Dreiser gave his estimation of Fort's genius as "simply stupendous", and he coached, corrected, and ushered Fort's work into print. Fort loved going to the library and researching, and he collected on scraps of paper any oddity that struck his fancy, phenomena that he designated beyond the explanatory power of science. Steinmeyer shows that Fort's speculations fit into the fizzy 1920s, and his book sold well. Fort insisted that "... nothing ever has been proved. Because there is nothing to prove." With everything all connected, the distinctions which science made were arbitrary and pointless. The _New York Tribune_ titled its laudatory review of the book "Science Mocked". Steinmeyer concedes that at a time when Gugliemo Marconi and Percival Lowell were telling the public about the endeavors of the Martians, Fort may have had a point. Generally, however, he had little real knowledge of how science worked, and his dismissal of science overall was fatuous. He was more appropriately skeptical of spiritualism, and he refused to be drawn on biblical miracles, because he drew the line at anything happening before 1800. He despised conspiracy theorists.
Fort was shy, and despite his confident prose and extraordinary speculations, he did not enjoy being with others much. Even Dreiser only met with him a score of times. He liked going to the movies. He devised a game called Super-checkers and was pleased with it; it had 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares. He had to play himself in solitaire, because no one else took it up. He hated using the telephone, and he hated dealing with doctors, thus hastening his own death in 1932, at age 57. By that time, he had published three other books along the lines of _The Book of the Damned_. He had a following, although his shyness kept him from enjoying it. There is a British periodical _Fortean Times_ that publishes Fort's style of oddities, but perhaps does not pay attention to the witticisms with which Fort wrote them up; it seems impossible to tell exactly what Fort took seriously and what he didn't. Steinmeyer's entertaining biography gives plenty of details on the enigmatic life of an oddball misfit. There are scientists and literary figures that occasionally hobnobbed with Fort, and many who wrote about him (some in praise), so he was an influential figure. He is thought by skeptics to be credulous and naïve, but his writing is full of contradictions and paradoxes. It is tough to give a portrait of a man who could write, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not," or "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written," but Steinmeyer has nicely placed Fort within his times and charted his effects on the years thereafter.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating Insights into an Odd Character
By G LeFever
Steinmeyer does a good job of encapsulating the life of Fort, who must not have been the easiest person to research. While a little short on Fort's actual motivation to catalog the world's oddest phenomena, the book provides fascinating accounts of Fort's troubled childhood, adult poverty, note-taking methodology and his strange and lengthy friendship with fellow author Theodore Dreiser. The subtitle "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" is misleading, but I suspect it may not have been Steinmeyer's idea. It's a fast and curious look into the life of one our grand eccentrics.
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