Edmond Moore Hamilton was born 110 years ago

Edmond Moore Hamilton (photo ©Felipebeltran01) was born on October 21, 1904, in Youngstown, Ohio, USA.

The young Edmond Hamilton was so good at school that he earned his high school diploma when he was just 14. Subsequently, his parents enrolled him at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where however after a good first year he started getting bored. In the third year, his attendance at the lessons became more and more rare until he was expelled.

Edmond Hamilton’s career as a writer began in 1926, when he published the short story “The Monster-God of Mamurth” in the magazine “Weird Tales”. Initially, he wrote fantasy stories but soon also started publishing science fiction stories in other pulp magazines. For this reason, he quickly became best known as one of the creators of the space opera subgenre.

At the end of the ’20s, Edmond Hamilton started writing the first of his series, that of the Interstellar Patrol, made ​​up of several stories of varying length. Among the many stories written in the ’30s, a highlight is “The Island of Unreason”, winner of the Jules Verne Prize, the first award in the science fiction field given by the fans’ votes.

In the years of the Great Depression, the need to earn some money pushed Edmond Hamilton to be very prolific, sometimes writing detective stories as well. For the same reasons, in the early ’40s, he started writing the series of Captain Future publishing several stories until the early ’50s.

In 1946, Edmond Hamilton started writing for DC Comics, especially Superman and Batman comics. This type of activity continued until 1966.

On December 31, 1946, Edmond Hamilton married his fellow writer Leigh Brackett. His style had already evolved since the beginning of his career, his marriage brought more improvements. Formally, both of them kept on developing their own works, in fact, they influenced each other. It’s possible that Hamilton contributed to the revision of two of his wife’s stories, which were expanded and republished as “The Secret of Sinharat” and “People of the Talisman“.

In 1949, Edmond Hamilton published the novel “The Star Kings”. In the following years, he published a sequel in four stories that in 1968 were fixed up in the novel “Return to the Stars”. Hamilton also wrote other stories set in that fictional universe: “Stark and the Star Kings” is a crossover with that of Leigh Brackett with Eric John Stark among its protagonists.

In the ’50s, Edmond Hamilton also published several other stories, including novels such as “City at World’s End” in 1951, “The Star of Life” in 1959, “The Haunted Stars” in 1960, and “Battle for the Stars” in 1961.

In the ’60s, Edmond Hamilton published his last great series, the Starwolf with Morgan Chane as its protagonist, consisting of “The Weapon from Beyond” (1967), “The Closed Worlds” (1968), and “World of the Starwolves” (1968).

Edmond Hamilton died on February 1, 1977, in Lancaster, California, following complications from kidney surgery. His novel “The Lake of Life” was published posthumously the following year.

In the course of his career, Edmond Hamilton was loved very much by readers even if sometimes criticism negatively assessed him for his role in the space opera often naive of the Golden Age, and for works aimed at kids such as Captain Future. Overall, he was a very important writer in the development of science fiction and in some ways, his stylistic improvements reflected the growth of the genre.

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