Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (photo ©Keith Purtell) was born on November 7, 1914, in Neola, Iowa, USA.
The first part of R.A. Lafferty’s life was quite normal. He attended night school at the University of Tulsa for two years from 1933 but left it before graduating. Between 1939 and 1942 he attended the International Correspondence School.
For a few years, R.A. Lafferty did various jobs and in 1942 he enlisted in the US Army. He served in various parts of the world until 1946 after receiving an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal during World War II.
It was only in the late ’50s that R.A. Lafferty started writing, when he was already a mature man. In 1959 he published his first short story “The Wagons”. He made his debut in the field of science fiction with the short story “Day of the Glacier” in 1960. He never devoted himself just to a genre but most of his works are considered science fiction.
In 1968, R.A. Lafferty published his first novel, “Past Master“. It showed how this author’s science fiction was very personal in a story of a particular journey into the past in search of Thomas More.
The plots of R.A. Lafferty’s stories were fragmented into a thousand subplots more or less connected with characters often over the top, all mixed in elements often inspired by the classics, not only of literature. It’s for this reason that he became a cult author but many people gave up reading his stories.
In 1968, R.A. Lafferty also published “Space Chantey”, essentially a science fiction version of the Odyssey. For a few years, he kept on working as an electrical engineer but in 1971 he devoted himself to his writing career full-time.
R.A. Lafferty’s interest in history and epics wasn’t just about those from Europe. In fact, in 1972 he published the novel “Okla Hannali”, which tells the story of the Choctaw tribe in Mississippi and later in Oklahoma after their forced relocation.
Suddenly, an author who came late to that kind of career became prolific and published several novels and short stories of various genres in a few years. Among them, in 1970 he published “Fourth Mansions”. In 1971 he published “The Devil is Dead”, the first novel of a trilogy. R.A. Lafferty couldn’t do things normally so in the internal chronology of the series this is the second one. In 1979 he published “Archipelago”, which is chronologically the first of the trilogy.
In 1980, R.A. Lafferty suffered a stroke that forced him to progressively slow down his activity. He still published novels such as “Annals of Klepsis” in 1983 and finished his trilogy with “More Than Melchisedech” in 1992, which actually consists of three novels.
In 1990, R.A. Lafferty was awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement for his career.
In 1994, R.A. Lafferty suffered another stroke, with even more serious consequences on his activity. The last science fiction novel he published was “Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage” in 1999.
R.A. Lafferty died on March 18, 2002, in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award was a further recognition but only posthumously. He wasn’t an author easy to read but his fans love him for his plots with no apparent sense full of irony and original uses of language.
