Author Biography and Bibliography

Autobiographical Sketch

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. This came home to me, to me who had always called myself a a Texan and thought of myself as a Texan, when I read that Thomas Wolfe warmed up for writing by walking the night streets of Brooklyn. He was from the hill country of northwest North Carolina, and so was my great-great grandfather—making Thomas and me, at least presumptively, distant cousins. Hemingway sharpened twenty pencils and Willa Cather read a passage from her bible; but Thomas Wolfe, bless him, swung his big body down Brooklyn streets and may have been thrashing out some weighty problem in Of Time and the River during the early hours of Thursday, the seventh of May 1931. I hope so. I like to think of him out there on the sidewalk worrying about Gene Gant and flaying NYU.

At any rate, I was born in that city on the southwest tip of Long Island. My parents lived in New Jersey at the time, but they moved and moved. To Peoria, where I played with Rosemary Dietsch, who lived next door, and her brothers Robert and Richard. To Massachusetts, where little Ruth McCann caught her hand in our car door. To Logan, Ohio, my father's home town, where Boyd Wright and I got stung by the bumble bees in our woodshed. To Des Moines, where a redheaded boy taught me chess while we were in the second grade. Then to Dallas for a year, and at last to Houston, which became my home town, the place I was "from."

I went to Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, where we read "The Masque of the Red Death" in fifth grade and learned "The Raven" in the sixth. We lived in a small house with two very large bedrooms; the front room was my parents', the back bedroom, with mint growing profusely beneath three of its six windows, was mine. I had no brothers or sisters, but I had a black-and-white spaniel called Boots; and I built models (mostly World War I airplanes, which still fascinate me—I have done two stories about them: "Continuing Westward" and "Against the Lafayette Escadrille") and collected comics and Big Little Books.

The thing I recall most vividly about Houston in the late thirties and early forties is the heat. Houston has almost precisely the climate of Calcutta, and until I was ready for high school there was no air conditioning except in theaters and Sears Department Store. We went to movies during the hottest part of the day to miss it, and when we came out of the theater the heat and sunlight were appalling; my father had to wrap his hand in his handkerchief to open the door of our car.

Our house stood midway between two mad scientists. Miller Porter in the house behind us was my own age but much tougher and cleverer, and built Tesla coils and other electric marvels. Across the street Mr. Fellows, a chemist, maintained a private laboratory over his garage. He blew himself up once in true comic-book style.

If all this were not enough to make a science-fiction fan of me, there was, only five sweltering blocks away, the Richmond Pharmacy, where a boy willing to crouch immobile behind the candy case could cram Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, or (my favorite) Famous Fantastic Mysteries while the druggist compounded prescriptions.

Almost unnoticed, the big, slow-moving ceiling fans vanished from the stores. The Second World War was over, and there was a room air conditioner in one of my bedroom windows and another in the dining room. Houston had begun to lose its Spanish-Southern character, and I was in high school, where I showed no aptitude for athletics (the only thing that counted) or much of anything else. I joined ROTC to get out of compulsory softball, and a year later the pappy shooters of the Texas National Guard, because guardsmen got two dollars and fifty cents for attending drills.

To my surprise, the Guard was fun. We fired on the rifle range and played soldier, with pay, for two weeks during school vacation. When the Korean War broke out we thought our outfit, G Company of the One Hundred and Forty-third Infantry, would be gone in a week. It never went; and although I would gladly have continued hanging around the armory waiting for orders, I found myself committed to attending Texas A&M.

It offered the cheapest possible college education to Texas boys, and at the time I went there was an all-male land-grant college specializing in animal husbandry and engineering. Only Dickens could have done justice to A&M as I knew it, and he would not have been believed. It was modeled on West Point, but lacked the aristocratic tradition and the sense of purpose. I dropped out at mid-term of my junior year, lost my student deferment, and was drafted.

I served in the Seventh Infantry Division during the closing months of the war and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. The day-to-day accounts I sent my mother will be found in Letters Home, published by a Canadian small press, United Mythologies.

The GI Bill let me finish my education at the University of Houston. Rosemary Dietsch came to Texas for a visit, and we were married five months after I took a job in engineering development. I stayed on that job for sixteen years, then left to join the staff of Plant Engineering, a technical magazine. Our son Roy was named for my father, whose real name, however, was Emerson Leroy Wolfe; my mother was Mary Olivia Ayers Wolfe. Our daughters Madeleine and Therese have given us granddaughters, Rebecca Marie Spizzirri and Elizabeth Rose Goulding. Our youngest, Matthew, has not yet married, though we nurse hopes.

I began to write in 1956, soon after Rosemary and I were married; we were living in a furnished apartment, and needed money to put down on a bed and a stove. My first sale was "The Dead Man" to Sir in 1965.

I have taught Clarion East and Clarion West, and have taught workshops for Florida Atlantic University. In 1996 I taught a semester of creative writing for Columbia College.

My work has been given three World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Deathrealm Award, and others, including awards from France and Italy. Although it has never won the Hugo, it has been nominated eight times.