Chester Anderson
Chester Anderson was an American author and poet born on August 11, 1932, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He attended the University of Miami in the 1950s but did not complete his degree, subsequently engaging in a variety of occupations including typesetting and motel management. Anderson gained recognition in the literary world with the publication of his poetry collections, including "Colloquy" in 1960 and "A Liturgy for Dragons" in 1961, which showcased elements of science fiction and fantasy. He authored several notable works of science fiction, particularly "The Butterfly Kid" (1967), which earned a Hugo Award nomination and is part of a trilogy that features self-referential narratives with authors appearing as characters. Aside from his fiction writing, he served as the editor of the magazine Crawdaddy during a brief period in the late 1960s. Despite an initial surge of creativity, his later career saw less prolific output until he returned to mainstream fiction with "Fox and Hare: The Story of a Friday Night." Chester Anderson passed away on his 59th birthday, August 11, 1991, leaving behind a legacy that blends literary experimentation with science fiction.
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Chester Anderson
Writer
- Born: August 11, 1932
- Birthplace: Stoneham, Massachusetts
- Died: April 11, 1991
- Place of death: Baldwin, Georgia
Biography
Chester Anderson was born on August 11, 1932, in Stoneham, Massachussetts. He attended the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, from 1952 to 1956, but did not complete his degree. He subsequently worked at numerous jobs, including typesetting, proofreading, janitorial work, and motel management. He was the founder of the Communications Company of San Francisco, which began business in 1967.
In 1960, Anderson published his first collection of poems, Colloquy. A second collection, A Liturgy for Dragons, appeared the following year and contained poems with elements of science fiction and fantasy. In 1963, he published his first novel, The Pink Palace, and the following year he cowrote a science-fiction novel, Ten Years to Doomsday, with Michael Kurland.
In 1967, he published another science-fiction novel, The Butterfly Kid, which was nominated for a Hugo Award. The Butterfly Kid is the first of a trilogy; the second novel,The Unicorn Girl (1969), was written by Kurland and the concluding volume, The Probability Pad (1970), by T. A Waters. These novels are unusual because they are written in a literary, self-referential style, with each book featuring its author as a character under his own name. This is a sort of self- Tuckerization, a variant of the practice of writing friends into stories which was first used by Wilson “Bob” Tucker, a science-fiction fan turned professional writer. The Butterfly Kid is the story of a pop music group who battles an invasion resulting from the introduction to the Greenwich Village drug scene of a strange pill that allows people’s fantasies to take material form.
Anderson’s initial productivity was followed by a long period of silence before he published Fox and Hare: The Story of a Friday Night, in which he returned to mainstream fiction. In addition to his own writing, he was the editor of the magazine Crawdaddy from 1968 to 1969. Like many small literary magazines, it was a labor of love and soon folded as Anderson encountered difficulties in sustaining its publication. Anderson died on August 11, 1991, the date of his fifty-ninth birthday.