Henry Kuttner was born on April 7, 1915, in Los Angeles, California, USA. Since his childhood, he was attracted to the embryonic genre of science fiction, reading the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and having the opportunity to read the magazine “Amazing Stories”. Over time, his interest expanded to horror thanks to the magazine “Weird Tales”.
For some time, Henry Kuttner worked in the agency literature of his uncle, Laurence D’Orsay, who was also a writer and critic. His first published story was “The Graveyard Rats,” which was of the horror genre and appeared in “Weird Tales” in 1936. Kuttner started publishing stories of various genres that formed, in the course of the years, various mini-cycles: Tony Quade, Elak of Atlantis, Thunder Jim Wade, Gallagher, and “Baldie”.
In the late ’30s, Henry Kuttner also published his first novellas, “The Time Trap” in 1938 and “Dr. Cyclops” in 1940, and the novel “A Million Years to Conquer”, also known as “The Creature from Beyond Infinity”, in 1940.
Henry Kuttner joined the “Lovecraft Circle”, a group of writers but also simple fans who were in correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. Several among them contributed to what are called the Cthulhu Mythos, writing stories set in the fictional universe of the Great Old Ones. Kuttner wrote several of these stories, which were published in the magazine “Weird Tales”.
It was in the “Lovecraft Circle” that Henry Kuttner met Catherine L. Moore, also a writer, with whom he got married in 1940. The couple began a collaboration in their work too, so substantially all the subsequent Kuttner’s works are written more or less with his wife.
The Kuttner / Moore couple used various pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. Among the products of their collaboration, there are the novels “Earth’s Last Citadel” (1943), “The Fairy Chessmen” (1946), and “The Portal in the Picture”, also known as “Beyond Earth’s Gates” (1946). In 1952, Gallagher’s stories were fixed up in “Robots Have No Tails”.
Some novels and stories published in the ’40s and ’50s are credited only to Henry Kuttner. It’s, for example, the case of the novel “Fury” in 1947, published as “Destination: Infinity” in 1956. In other cases, different editions can be credited to Kuttner or one of the pseudonyms of the couple, such as “The Well of Worlds” (1952).
In the ’50s, Henry Kuttner decided he wanted to learn more about science and enrolled in university physics courses despite being far more than 30 years old. In 1954, he earned a Bachelor of Arts and was about to earn a Master of Arts when he died due to a heart attack on February 4, 1958.
Henry Kuttner passed away much too early, and his career was short, though intense. He was a versatile writer who wrote stories of various genres and in various styles, sometimes inspired by other authors. The influence of his wife, C.L. Moore, was certainly significant, but Kuttner was definitely an important author in various ways in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
