Charles Fort

Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932) was a writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. (According to some sources he was born on August 9.)

Overview

Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York, of Dutch ancestry. His grocer father was something of an authoritarian, and instilled a sense of independence into the young Fort. In his youth, Fort was a budding naturalist who would collect sea shells, minerals, and birds. Curious and intelligent, the young Fort did not excel at school, though he was quite a wit and full of knowledge about the world — yet this was only a world he had read of.

Related Topics:
1874 - Albany, New York - Dutch - Father - Independence - Naturalist - Sea shell - Mineral - Bird - Curious - Intelligent - School - Wit

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So, at age 18, Fort left New York on a worldwide tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience". He travelled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until finally falling ill in South Africa. Returning home he was nursed by and later married Anna Filing, a girl he had known from his childhood. Success as a short story writer was intermittent between periods of terrible poverty and depression.

Related Topics:
United States - Scotland - England - South Africa - Anna Filing - Childhood - Short story - Poverty - Depression

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Fort wrote ten novels, though only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1906), was published — critics said it was ahead of its time but it was commercially unsuccessful. In 1915, Fort began to write two books, entitled X and Y, the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization extant at the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser, who attempted to get them published, but to no avail. Disheartened by this failure, Fort burnt the manuscripts, but was soon renewed to begin work on the book that would change the course of his life, The Book of the Damned. The title referred to "damned data" that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account and was thus rejected or ignored.

Related Topics:
Novel - 1906 - 1915 - X - Y - Mars - Earth - Civilization - South Pole - Theodore Dreiser - Manuscript - The Book of the Damned

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Fort's experience as a journalist coupled with a contrarian nature prepared him for his real-life work, mocking at the pretensions of scientific positivism and the tendency of journalists and editors of newspapers and scientific journals to rationalize away the scientifically incorrect.

Related Topics:
Journalist - Positivism - Newspaper - Scientific - Journal

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