Short Fiction - The 50's

Murray Leinster was a prolific and outstanding writer of Science fiction. He was born William Fitzgerald Jenkins on June 16, 1896 in Norfolk, Virginia and finished his formal education at the age of 13. With the loss of his father’s job and subsequent downturn in the family’s fortunes, Leinster would not be able to pursue the career in chemistry that he had longed for. But he would go on to another significant achievement - publishing more than 1,500 short stories, novellas, and novels in his lifetime. As well as science fiction, Leinster wrote love stories, murder mysteries, adventure stories, westerns, fantasy, television and film scripts, and mainstream fiction. Leinster wrote variously over the years as Will F. Jenkins (mostly for mainstream magazines such as Colliers or The Saturday Evening Post), Murray Leinster (mostly for sci-fi), William F. Jenkins, William Fitzgerald, and even as Louisa Carter Lee for romance novels and potboilers. Leinster was definitely a renaissance man of words and ideas. But he is remembered for his remarkable prescience and vision in the sci-fi genre, especially around innovations in science and communications technologies.