A forgotten old school

[randy_byers]

For as long as I have been reading fantasy, Perley Poore Sheehan has been one of the "greats" of the great old days when Bob Davis was creating a new literature of the imagination in the pages of the Munsey magazines. Yet it was as a writer of popular romances that his contemporaries knew -- and forgot -- him.

Why was this? Granted that any of those few writers of fantasy would be remembered because he was one of a small circle, why has Sheehan been persistently ranked with Merritt, Austin Hall, Homer Eon Flint, "Francis Stevens"?

-- P. Schuyler Miller, introduction to the 1953 Polaris Press edition of Sheehan's The Abyss of Wonders (1915), although apparently Miller originally wrote this piece in 1931 (when 1915 would hardly have been the "great old days")

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Merritt was always a prominent name in his time, I think, and Stevens gains cachet from her mysterious background. But Hall and Flint are no more than names to me.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Flint is really the odd duck in this group, since he was less a fantasist than a proto-scientifiction writer. I have a feeling (based on your comments on Doc Smith) that you wouldn't care much for him.

Merritt's "The Moon Pool" was a huge hit immediately upon publication, and you're certainly right that he was prominent in his day. He even had a magazine named after him at one point.