Bailey was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, to Thomas Benjamin Bailey, a city employee, and Nancy Priscilla (née Smith). He was educated at the University of North Carolina (A.B. 1924, M.A. 1927, Ph.D 1934) and taught English there from 1930.[1]
The
Science Fiction Research Association gives recognition in the form of the
Pilgrim Award in honor of his seminal work Pilgrims Through Space and Time. Reviewer
Willy Ley, however, found the volume disappointing; while praising the core of the work, the master's thesis and doctoral dissertation written by Bailey years earlier, he faulted the remainder of the book as inferior, "obviously pasted to the original dissertation both loosely and clumsily."[2]
He was struck by a car and died later from a blood clot, in 1979.
Books
Supplementary Exercises for Use in English Courses for Engineers: Prepared to Accompany Howell's Handbook of English in Engineering Usage with Cross References to Woolley and Scott's College Handbook of Composition and Greever and Jones' The Century Collection, Chapman & Hall, (1931)
Poe's "Stonehenge", University Press, (1941)
Sources for Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, "Hans Pfaal," and Other Pieces,
Modern Language Association of America, (1942)
Hardy's "Imbedded Fossil", North Carolina University, (1945)
Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, (1947)
Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, with a foreword by Thomas D. Clareson,
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, (1972)
Thomas Hardy and His Cosmic Mind: A New Reading of the Dynasts, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, (1977)
Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, by Adam Seaborn, a facsimile reproduction with an introduction by J. O. Bailey, n.d.