John W. Campbell

“John W. Campbell
Born: 6/8/1910 Newark New Jersey USADied: 7/11/1971 Mountainside New Jersey USA

John W. Campbell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from Duke in the early l930's, at a time, he said, when there was absolutely no work for a young scientist but apparently income for a new science fiction writer. His short stories and novels published in AMAZING and the then-leading science fiction magazine, ASTOUNDING were at once successful and marked him as perhaps the best science fiction writer of his time: his writing career essentially concluded with WHO GOES THERE? which was written before but published in ASTOUNDING after he had become its editor. As editor of that magazine, he insisted upon rigorous scientific background, humanized characters and values and a standard of writing comparable to that in the leading consumer magazines of the time. In pursuit, Campbell found a generation of new writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, A.E. Van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, Lester del Rey among them - who collectively (and individually!) produced an extraordinary body of work. Almost all of the early science fiction masterpieces were published in ASTOUNDING in the l940's. The last quarter century of his editorship was not as revolutionary as his first ten years but Campbell continued to bring new writers and a high standard of writing through his tenure. He was regarded in his lifetime and with little dispute as the greatest science fiction editor and one of the great magazine editors of the century. He died suddenly, while watching television, on the evening of July 11, l971 at his home in New Jersey.”
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