Will Jenkins
William Fitzgerald Jenkins, born on June 16, 1896, in Norfolk, Virginia, was a prolific American freelance writer best known by his pen name, Murray Leinster. He began his writing career at a young age after dropping out of school and went on to become a key figure in the science fiction genre, often referred to as the dean of science fiction. Jenkins published his first story at seventeen and contributed hundreds of works across various genres, including adventure, mystery, and horror, primarily in pulp magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. His notable contributions to science fiction include the influential story "The Runaway Skyscraper," and he is credited with pioneering concepts that foreshadowed personal computers and the Internet.
Throughout his career, Jenkins produced over 1,500 stories and published more than 200 novels and screenplays, demonstrating a remarkable versatility in his writing. His work earned him several accolades, including a Hugo Award for his novelette "Exploration Team" and posthumous recognition for his influence on the genre. Jenkins's legacy extends beyond literature into television, with several series inspired by his writings. He passed away on June 8, 1975, leaving behind a substantial body of work that continues to impact science fiction and popular culture.
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Will Jenkins
Writer
- Born: June 16, 1896
- Birthplace: Norfolk, Virginia
- Died: June 8, 1975
- Place of death: Gloucester, Virginia
Biography
William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born June 16, 1896, in Norfolk, Virginia. He dropped out of school at age thirteen to go to work. Perhaps inspired by the publication of his classroom eulogy of Robert E. Lee, he concentrated on writing and published his first story when he was seventeen years old. For virtually his working entire life he earned his income as a freelance writer and became one of the major forces in science fiction—indeed, he is universally regarded as the dean of that genre—under his most frequent pseudonym, Murray Leinster.
Jenkins served with the U.S. Army’s Committee of Public Information during World War I. In 1919, the year after the war ended, he began his prolific freelance writing career. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Jenkins published several hundred stories—including adventure, detective, horror, and Western tales—in pulp magazines, including Weird Tales and Astounding, under his given name or variations upon it. His Leinster pseudonym, at first used for periodicals in which he placed several stories, began appearing regularly in the late 1920’s, primarily for speculative works. He also published more than 1,500 stories and occasional articles throughout his career in mainstream magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Liberty.
Jenkins’s novel, Murder Madness a hybrid mystery and science-fiction work, appeared in 1931, after serialization in Astounding. In addition to a constant stream of shorter works, during the decade of the 1930’s he published a dozen novels, mostly under his own name, primarily in the mystery and Western genres. During World War II, Jenkins again saw military service, this time for the U.S. Office of War Information. After the war, he picked up where he had left off, turning out a huge volume of written work. Besides Jenkins’s outpouring of stories, he published more than two hundred novels, novellas, novelettes, and collections. He also wrote screenplays for more than a dozen movies, hundreds of radio and television scripts, and inspired several television series, including Land of the Giants and Time Tunnel.
Jenkins was honored with the Liberty Award in 1937 for his story “A Very Nice Family.” He won the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Exploration Team, was nominated for the 1960 Hugo for his novel The Pirates of Zan, and was awarded a posthumous Hugo in 1996 for Best Novelette for First Contact (1945). He was the guest of honor at the Twenty-First Worldcon in 1963, and in 1995 the Sidewise Award for Alternate History was named in honor of his story “Sidewise in Time” (1950).
Jenkins is widely credited with inventing the genre of science fiction in his short story “The Runaway Skyscraper” (1919), and anticipating the birth of personal computers and the Internet in his story “A Logic Named Joe” (1945). He also patented the back-projector special effect for motion pictures. He died on June 8, 1975, at the age of seventy-eight.