Murray Leinster was a
pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975), an American writer of genre fiction, particularly of
science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
Writing career
Leinster was born in
Norfolk, Virginia, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins. His father was an accountant. Although both parents were born in Virginia, the family lived in Manhattan in 1910, according to the 1910 Federal Census. A high school dropout, he nevertheless began a career as a freelance writer before
World War I. He was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, "The Foreigner", appeared in the May 1916 issue of
H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine; in a September 2022 interview, Leinster's daughter stated that Mencken recommended the use of a pseudonym for non-Smart Set content.[1]
When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales, and even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.
Leinster's first science fiction story, "
The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of
Hugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astounding included his story "Tanks"). His work continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as Collier's Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.[2]
Leinster was one of the few science fiction writers from the 1930s to survive in the
John W. Campbell era of higher writing standards, publishing over three dozen stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's editorship. The last story by Leinster in Analog was "Quarantine World" in the November 1966 issue, thirty-six years after his appearance in the premier January 1930 issue.
Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "
A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the
Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of
servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization."[4]
During
World War II, he served in the
United States Office of War Information.[2] After the war, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald", "Fitzgerald Jenkins" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue.
Leinster's career also included tie-in fiction based on several science fiction TV series: an episodic 1960 novel, Men into Space, was derived from the series' basic concepts, but Leinster had little knowledge of the series' actual content, and none of the book episodes bear any relationship to the filmed episodes.[6]Men Into Space was followed, seven years later, by two original novels based on The Time Tunnel (1967), and three based on Land of the Giants (1968–69).
Other endeavors
Leinster was also an inventor under his real name of William F. Jenkins, best known for the
front projection process used in
special effects.[7] He appeared in September 1953 on an episode of the educational series American Inventory, in which he discussed the possibility of space travel.[8]
Pseudonym
"Murray" is a reference to Leinster's mother's maiden name ("Murry"), while "Leinster" alluded to the connection between his middle name ("Fitzgerald") and the
Dukes of Leinster.[1]
Personal life
In 1921, he married Mary Mandola. They had four daughters.
Honors and awards
Liberty Award (1937) for "A Very Nice Family", first published in the January 2, 1937 issue of Liberty.
The Time Tunnel, Pyramid, January 1967; original promotional novel based on the 1966–1967 U.S television series The Time Tunnel, a very different story than Leinster's 1964 novel of the same name.
The Time Tunnel: Timeslip!, Pyramid, July 1967; original novel based on the television series.
Land of the Giants, Pyramid, September 1968; original novel based on
television series, reinventing the origin story.
Land of the Giants 2: The Hot Spot, Pyramid, April 1969; original novel based on the television series.
Land of the Giants 3: Unknown Danger, Pyramid, September 1969; original novel based on the television series.
Politics, in Amazing Stories, No. 6, June 1932
Western
The Gamblin' Kid (as Will F. Jenkins),
A. L. Burt, 1933; first appeared in Western Action Novels, March 1937.
Mexican Trail (as Will F. Jenkins), A. L. Burt, 1933.
Outlaw Sheriff (as Will F. Jenkins), King, 1934.
Fighting Horse Valley (as Will F. Jenkins), King, 1934.
Kid Deputy (as Will F. Jenkins), Alfred H. King, 1935; first serialized in Triple-X Western, February - April 1928.
Black Sheep (as Will F. Jenkins), Julian Messer, 1936.
Guns for Achin (as Will F. Jenkins), Wright & Brown, 1936; first appeared in Smashing Novels, November 1936.
Wanted Dead or Alive!, Quarter Books, 1949; first serialized in Triple-X Magazine, February - May 1929.
Outlaw Guns, Star Books, 1950.
Son of the Flying 'Y' (as Will F. Jenkins), Fawcett, 1951.
Cattle Rustlers (as Will F. Jenkins), Ward Lock, 1952.
Dallas (as Will F. Jenkins), Fawcett, 1950. Novelization of screenplay by John Twist.
Story collections
The Last Space Ship, Fell, 1949.
"The Boomerang Circuit", Thrilling Wonder, June 1947
"The Disciplinary Circuit", Thrilling Wonder, Winter 1946
"The Manless Worlds", Thrilling Wonder, February 1947
^This phenomenon was not uncommon in the pre-VCR era. In the effort to rush a book onto the shelves to coincide with the airing of a new TV series, the commissioned novelist often had only limited source material to work from, such as a series "writer's bible", some production photos and perhaps a pilot script.