Judith Merril

Author

• Born: January 21, 1923
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 12, 1997
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Biography

Judith Merril was born Josephine Juliet Grossman on January 21, 1923, in New York City, although she was renamed Judith shortly after her birth. Her mother, Ethel Hurwitch, was a suffragette active in the founding of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her father Samuel, the son of a rabbi (for whom she was originally named), was a writer whose suicide while she was a child affected Merril profoundly.

Merril was a political progressive at an early age, and after joining the Young People’s Socialist League while attending City College, she began writing articles for publications devoted to communism and Zionism. In 1940, she married a fellow league member, Danny Zissman, and moved to Philadephia before returning to New York the following year. Her first daughter, Merril, was born in 1942.

After a brief stay in San Francisco during which her husband shipped out with the Navy, Merril returned once again to New York. She had begun reading science fiction while recuperating from illness shortly after her marriage, and in New York became acquainted with future science-fiction literary agent Virginia Kidd while living in a Greenwich Village commune. She also encountered the fan organization the Futurians, many of whose members became influential science fiction writers. Her marriage ended in 1945, and Merril began writing fiction while holding down a series of odd jobs, including file clerk and waitress. She made early sales to detective magazines to which members of the Futurians contributed.

In 1948, she took an editing job at Bantam Books. That year, using her daughter’s first name as her pseudonym, Judith Merril published her first (and now much reprinted) science fiction story, “That Only a Mother,” in the June issue of Astounding, at the time the leading science- fiction magazine. Merril married fellow Futurian Frederik Pohl in 1949, and gave birth to their daughter, Ann, the following year. Also in 1950, she and Pohl cofounded the Hydra Club, an important professional science fiction writing group.

The next decade saw most of Merril’s output as a writer of science fiction: a career total of twenty-six short stories and four novels, two written in collaboration with other authors. Much of her work explored the impact of technology and its consequences on the lives of ordinary people, especially women, and in time her stories were recognized as having a strong feminist slant, a character still unusual in science fiction at that time. Merril’s first novel, Shadows on the Hearth (1950), a cautionary tale of nuclear war, was adapted for television the year of its publication.

She wrote two novels with Cyril M. Kornbluth, Outpost Mars (1952) and Gunner Cade (1952), under the pseudonym Cyril Judd. She also collaborated with Pohl, whom she divorced in 1953. In these and other works, Merril took the approach that writing, and science fiction in particular, could serve as a tool for social change. Much of her writing was subtly (if not overtly) political and critical of capitalist culture and prevailing social norms. The best of her early short fiction was collected in Out of Bounds (1960) and Daughters of Earth, and Other Stories (1968).

Merril had edited a half-dozen science-fiction anthologies when, in 1956—the same year that she cofounded the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference—she compiled SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, the first of an annual series that would run (under several title changes) until 1967. Merril mixed both traditional and literary science fiction, often culling her selection from nongenre sources, and the series proved one of the most influential in modern science fiction. During the 1960’s Merril continued to edit anthologies, including England Swings SF(1968), an early collection of New Wave science fiction, and she wrote the book review column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also married Daniel Sugrue, a union organizer whom she would divorce in 1975.

Appalled by America’s involvement in Vietnam and increasingly frustrated with American political policies, Merril moved to Canada in 1969. Her donation of her science-fiction collection to Rochdale college, which was moved to the Toronto Public Library in 1969, became the foundation of the Space Out Science Fiction Library (renamed the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy), the largest publicly housed science fiction library in the world. Merril tirelessly promoted science fiction throughout Canada, in her writing, lecture, television, and radio appearances, and she promoted Canadian science fiction through her anthology Tesseracts (1985). She died of heart failure on September 12, 1997. A biography of Merril, Better to Have Loved: A Life of Judith Merril, by her granddaughter, Emma Pohl-Weary, won science fiction’s Hugo Award in 2003.