Zenna Henderson
Zenna Henderson was an influential American science fiction writer born on November 1, 1917, near Tucson, Arizona. Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she pursued a degree from Arizona State College and began her career as a teacher, including a notable role in a Japanese-American Relocation Camp during World War II. After marrying Richard Harry Henderson in 1943 and later divorcing, she retained her married name and embarked on a writing career that would see her create some of the genre's most memorable characters, particularly "The People," a race of beings with psychic abilities living among humans. Her stories often reflected her empathy for children and marginalized individuals, drawing from her teaching experiences. Henderson's notable works include "Pilgrimage: The Book of the People" and "The Anything Box," the latter exploring themes of alienation and psychological complexity through the lens of her educational background. Throughout her life, she maintained a low profile, focusing on her teaching career while producing significant contributions to science fiction until her death from cancer in 1983. Her work continues to resonate, illustrating the intersection of humanity and the extraordinary in her storytelling.
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Zenna Henderson
Fiction Writer
- Born: November 1, 1917
- Birthplace: Tucson, Arizona
- Died: May 11, 1983
Biography
Zenna Henderson was born Zenna Chlarson just outside of Tucson on Arizona, November 1, 1917. She was the daughter of Rudolph Louis Chlarson and Emily Vernell Rowley, who raised Zenna in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She attended Arizona State College, receiving her B.A. in 1940, and began teaching in Arizona public schools. During World War II she was hired to teach in the Japanese-American Relocation Camp in Rivers, Arizona. In 1943, she married Richard Harry Henderson in the Methodist Church, and considered herself an evangelical Methodist for the rest of her life; religious themes often inform her stories.
After the war, Zenna Henderson taught in the Eloy school district outside of Tucson. In 1950, she and her husband divorced, but she kept her married name (although she did not, like other early female science fiction writers, adapt a male or ambiguous pen name). Her first science fiction story, “Come on, Wagon!,” appeared in 1951, but her best-known characters, “The People,” appeared the following year in the short story “Ararat” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She continued to develop stories about “The People,” a race indistinguishable from humans and living among us, yet graced with superhuman psychic powers. Before the end of the decade, Henderson had published twenty stories in various science fiction magazines; one of them, “Captivity,” was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959.
Henderson’s experience with the War Department in the Relocation Camp led to an invitation for her to teach at a U.S. Air Force base north of Paris, France, which she did from 1956 to 1958. Returning to the States, she worked for a year in a children’s hospital in Connecticut. She resumed teaching first grade in Arizona from 1960 until her death from cancer on May 11, 1983.
Rewriting her first six “People” stories as a novel, Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961), Henderson followed that success with a similar collection of stories with psychological themes, The Anything Box (1965). The title story is typical of Henderson’s incorporation of her teaching experience into her fiction. The narrator is the teacher of a disturbed young girl who uses an alien technology to retreat into a world of her own—a very real possibility without such technology in the very real children Henderson taught. Henderson’s empathy with children labeled “different” serves her fiction in allowing her to present the “otherness” of alien races convincingly.
In 1966, Henderson collected another group of “People” stories under the title of No Different Flesh, which was reissued as a mass-market paperback, and made into the 1972 made-for-tv movie The People, starring William Shatner and Kim Darby on ABC. Despite her success in the science fiction field, Henderson maintained her privacy, rarely granting interviews or appearing at conventions, and made teaching her primary concern.