Frederik Pohl Popular Books

Frederik Pohl Biography & Facts

Frederik George Pohl Jr. (; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year's best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four "year's best novel" awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science-fiction writers, and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas The Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first 40 years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction, and it was a finalist for three other year's best novel awards. He won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards, including receiving both for the 1977 novel Gateway. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers. Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, "The Way the Future Blogs". Early life and family Pohl was the son of Frederik (originally Friedrich) George Pohl (a salesman of German descent) and Anna Jane Mason. Pohl Sr. held various jobs, and the Pohls lived in such far-flung locations as Texas, California, New Mexico, and the Panama Canal Zone. The family settled in Brooklyn when Pohl was around seven. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, and dropped out at 17. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary diploma from Brooklyn Tech. While a teenager, he co-founded the New York–based Futurians fan group, and began lifelong friendships with Donald Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, and others who would become important writers and editors. Pohl later said that other "friends came and went and were gone, [but] many of the ones I met through fandom were friends all their lives – Isaac, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, [and] Dick Wilson. In fact, there are one or two – Jack Robins, Dave Kyle – whom I still count as friends, seventy-odd years later...." He published a science-fiction fanzine called Mind of Man. In 1936, Pohl joined the Young Communist League because of its positions for unions and against racial prejudice, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini. He became president of the local Flatbush III Branch of the YCL in Brooklyn. Pohl has said that after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the party line changed and he could no longer support it, at which point he left. During World War II, Pohl served in the United States Army from April 1943 until November 1945, rising to sergeant as an elite Air Corps weatherman. After training in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Colorado, he was mainly stationed in Italy with the 456th Bombardment Group. Pohl was married five times. His first wife, Leslie Perri, was another Futurian; they were married in August 1940, and divorced in 1944. He then married Dorothy Les Tina in Paris in August 1945 while both were serving in the military in Europe; the marriage ended in 1947. During 1948, he married Judith Merril; they had a daughter, Ann. Pohl and Merril divorced in 1952. In 1953, he married Carol M. Ulf Stanton, with whom he had three children and collaborated on several books; they separated in 1977 and were divorced in 1983. From 1984 until his death, Pohl was married to science-fiction expert and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull. He fathered four children – Ann (m. Walter Weary), Frederik III (born and died in 1954, aged one month), Frederik IV (a Los Angeles-based actor, writer, and producer), and Kathy. Grandchildren include Canadian writer Emily Pohl-Weary and chef Tobias Pohl-Weary. From 1984 on, he lived in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was previously a longtime resident of Middletown, New Jersey. Career Early writing Pohl began writing in the late 1930s, using pseudonyms for most of his early works. His first publication was the poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna" under the name of Elton Andrews, in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stories, edited by T. O'Conor Sloane. (Pohl asked readers 30 years later, "we would take it as a personal favor if no one ever looked it up".) His first story, the collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth "Before the Universe", appeared in 1940 under the pseudonym S.D. Gottesman. Editor and agent Pohl started a career as a literary agent in 1937, but it was a sideline for him until after World War II, when he began doing it full-time. Pohl stopped being Asimov's agent—the only one the latter ever had—when he became editor from 1939 to 1943 of two pulp magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. In his autobiography, Pohl said that he stopped editing the two magazines at roughly the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Stories by Pohl often appeared in these magazines, but never under his own name. Work written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth was credited to S. D. Gottesman or Scott Mariner; other collaborative work (with any combination of Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, or Robert A. W. Lownes) was credited to Paul Dennis Lavond. For Pohl's solo work, stories were credited to James MacCreigh (or for one story only, Warren F. Howard.) Works by "Gottesman", "Lavond", and "MacCreigh" continued to appear in various science-fiction pulp magazines throughout the 1940s. He also worked as an advertising copywriter and then as a copywriter and book editor for Popular Science. Pohl co-founded the Hydra Club, a loose collection of science-fiction professionals and fans who met during the late 1940s and 1950s. From the early 1960s until 1969, Pohl served as editor of Galaxy Science Fiction and Worlds of If magazines, taking over after the ailing H. L. Gold could no longer continue working "around the end of 1960". Under his leadership, If won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine for 1966, 1967 and 1968. Pohl hired Judy-Lynn del Rey as his assistant editor at Galaxy and If. He also served as editor of Worlds of Tomorrow from its first issue in 1963 until it was merged into If in 1967. In the mid-1970s, Pohl acquired and edited novels for Bantam Books, published as "A Frederik Pohl Selection"; these included Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Joanna Russ's The Female Man. He also edited a number of science-fiction anthologies. Novelist Though he retired his pen names "Gottesman", "Lavond", and "MacCreigh" by the early 1950s, Pohl still occasionally used pseudonyms, even after he began to publish work under his real name. These occasional pseudonyms, all of which date from the early 1.... Discover the Frederik Pohl popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Frederik Pohl books.