Joseph Ward Moore, this was his full name, was born on August 10, 1903, in Madison, New Jersey, USA.

According to a story, Ward Moore was expelled from the high school he attended for his anti-war activities during World War I. Later, Moore claimed to have voluntarily abandoned the school to be a writer. Later, he attended Columbia College, but fundamentally, he was a self-taught man.

At the beginning of the ’20s, Ward Moore claims to have spent a long time as a hobo and having toured the USA. In the mid-’20s, he worked in a bookstore in Chicago. In 1929, he moved to California, where he lived the rest of his life, doing various jobs.

In 1942, Ward Moore published his first novel, “Breathe the Air Again”, set during the Great Depression. It contained many autobiographical elements, so much so that the author himself appears as a character. It was to be the first book of a trilogy, but the sequels were never published.

In the ’40s, Ward Moore wrote short stories, articles, and reviews for newspapers and magazines. In 1942, he married Lorna Lenzi, with whom he had seven children. In 1947, he published his first science fiction novel, “Greener Than You Think”, a catastrophic story of a mutant grass that replaces all the others.

In the early ’50s, Ward Moore started his collaboration with “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction”. In 1953, he published his most famous novel, “Bring the Jubillee“. In the same year, he published the post-apocalyptic story “Lot” and the year after, its sequel “Lot’s Daughter”. In 1962, these stories were adapted into the movie “Panic in Year Zero!”.

In 1956, Ward Moore published the novel “Cloud by Day”, a dramatic story in which a fire threatens an area of ​​California and several members of the local community react in different ways.

Ward Moore was never a prolific author, and in the ’60s wrote even less. In 1968, he published “Joyleg” together with Avram Davidson, a satirical story about a strange old man.

In 1965, Ward Moore married writer Raylyn Moore. The writer died on January 29, 1978. After his death, the novel “Caduceus Wild” was published, which speaks of a nation ruled by doctors. It was written with Robert Bradford and was completed already in 1959.

Ward Moore has left us very few novels and some short fiction, so he often tends to be forgotten. The quality of his work, however, was generally high, so he deserves to be remembered by science fiction fans.