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Clare Winger Harris

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Clare Winger Harris
Clare Winger Harris, as pictured in the 1929 debut issue of Science Wonder Quarterly
Clare Winger Harris, as pictured in the 1929 debut issue of Science Wonder Quarterly
BornClare Winger
(1891-01-18)January 18, 1891
Freeport, Illinois
DiedOctober 26, 1968 (age 77)
Pasadena, California
NationalityAmerican
Period1923–1933
GenreScience fiction
SpouseFrank Clyde Harris
Children3
Cover of the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, which featured Clare Winger Harris's classic short story "The Miracle of the Lily."

Clare Winger Harris (January 18, 1891 – October 26, 1968[1]) was a pioneering science fiction writer whose short stories were published during the 1920s. She is credited as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines.[2][3][4] Harris began publishing stories in 1926 and soon became popular with readers, with most of her fiction appearing in the influential magazine Amazing Stories.[1] She published a total of twelve stories, all but one of which were collected in 1947 as Away From the Here and Now; a full collection was not published until 2019 when The Artificial Man and Other Stories appeared. Her stories, which often feature strong female characters, have been reprinted in anthologies such as Library of America's The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women and Wesleyan University Press's Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.

Life

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Clare Winger was born on January 18, 1891, in Freeport, Illinois.[2][5] Her father, Frank Stover Winger, was an electrical contractor who also wrote science fiction; in 1917, he published a novel called The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger. Her mother, May Stover, was the daughter of D.C. Stover, founder of the Stover Manufacturing and Engine Company and the richest man in Freeport.[2] After their children were born and raised, Frank and May divorced.[1]

Winger graduated in 1910 from Lake View High School in Chicago and attended Smith College without completing her degree.[2] In 1912, she married Frank Clyde Harris.[2][6] Her husband was an architect and engineer who later became president of the American Monorail Company of Cleveland, Ohio.[1][7]

After marrying, Harris and her husband spent several years in Greece and Palestine, where Harris researched for her book Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece.[8] Harris gave birth to three sons (Clyde Winger, born 1915; Donald Stover, born 1916; and Lynn Thackrey, born 1918)[6][2] and lived in Manhattan, Kansas for a time, where her husband was an associate professor of architecture at Kansas State Agricultural College. She and her family later lived in Fairfield, Iowa[8] but by 1927, the family had moved to Lakewood, Ohio.[1] Her career as a writer spanned the years 1923 to 1933, during her tenures in these locations.

Harris ceased writing stories after 1933. She was still living in Lakewood in 1935, and according to an interview with her grandson, she and Frank "stayed together until their kids were fully grown."[1] Clare and Frank's youngest son turned 18 in 1936, and by 1940, U.S. census records show Clare W. Harris as divorced and living in Pasadena, California, where she lived the rest of her life.[2]

Harris died on October 26, 1968, in Pasadena.[1] She lived alone and didn't have a lot of money, sometimes working as a switchboard operator to bring in extra income.[1] However, a year before her death she inherited a quarter of her grandfather's estate valued at more than two million dollars.[2] Her grandfather had died in 1908 but his inheritance was contested in the courts for nearly six decades.[2]

Writing career

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Cover of the December 1926 issue of Amazing Stories that Clare Winger Harris' short story “The Fate of the Poseidonia“ describes.

Harris debuted as a writer in 1923 with a novel, a piece of historical fiction entitled Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece.[1] The rest of her work would be very different, as it consisted entirely of short stories in the realm of science fiction.

Harris published her first short story, "A Runaway World," in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales.[2] In December of that year, she submitted a story for a contest being run by Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback. Harris's story, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (a space opera about Martians who steal Earth's water),[3] placed third.[9][2] She soon became one of Gernsback's most popular writers.

Harris eventually published 11 short stories in pulp magazines, most of them in Amazing Stories (although she also published in other places such as Science Wonder Quarterly). She wrote her most acclaimed works during the 1920s; in 1930, she stopped writing to raise and educate her children.[4][10] Her absence from the pulps was noted—a fan wrote in to Amazing Stories in late 1930 to ask, “What happened to Clare Winger Harris? I’ve missed her . . .”[1] However, she did publish one story in 1933—titled "The Vibrometer," it appeared in a mimeographed pamphlet called Science Fiction. The editors, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were high school students in Cleveland at the time.[1][11]

Harris self-published a collection of her stories titled Away from Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science in 1947, which collected all of her short stories except "The Vibrometer". The collection received an award from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.[2] In 2019, Belt Publishing released The Artificial Man and Other Stories, which collected all of her stories including "The Vibrometer."[11][12]

Harris also wrote one of the first attempts to classify science fiction when, in the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, she listed 16 basic science fiction themes, including "interplanetary space travel," "adventures on other worlds," and "the creation of synthetic life."[13]

Harris's writing has been described as being "fascinated by paradoxes of time, space travel, the possibility of inhabiting other worlds (in particular, the planet Mars), modern technology as it might be applied to humanity ... and how humanity might evolve or perhaps be supplanted by other species."[12] Harris's writings often dealt with characters on the "borders of humanity" such as cyborgs[14] and featured strong female characters who were equal to men, such as with the character of Sylvia, an airplane mechanic and pilot in her story "The Ape Cycle."[15]

Critical view and influence

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Described as a "pioneering" science fiction author,[1][16] Harris was the first female SF author to consistently write under her own name[2] (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who wrote under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, published a single science fiction story in 1904 using the name "G.M. Barrows" -- her real name, although the use of initials disguised her gender. Her true identity wasn't revealed until 1952, four years after her death).[10][17][18] Harris's stories appeared in the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, less than a year after the magazine was founded. She was popular enough with fans of the time for "her name to be splashed on future covers to attract readers."[19]

As Jane Donawerth wrote in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, among the important aspects of Harris's contributions is that "she was a woman writer in a genre generally written by men, she wrote stories that included portraits of feminine strength, and she offered visions of a science that was not solely the province of privileged white men."[20]

Even though Harris published only a handful of stories, almost all of them have been reprinted over the years. Of these, "The Miracle of the Lily" has been reprinted the most, appearing in anthologies such as The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin released by the Library of America in 2018[21] and Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, released in 2021 by the British Library.[22] The story has also been praised by many critics, with Forrest J Ackerman calling it a "classic"[23] and Richard Lupoff saying it would have "won the Hugo Award for best short story, if the award had existed then."[24][25][26] Lupoff also wrote that "[w]hile today's reader may find her prose creaky and old-fashioned, the stories positively teem with still-fresh and provocative ideas.[27]

Harris's stories have also been reprinted in a number of other anthologies in recent decades, including two books from Wesleyan University Press: 2016's Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction[28] and 2006's Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century, with the later including a critical essay about Harris.[20] Additional anthologies reprinting her work include Sci-Fi Womanthology, Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935;[29] and Gosh Wow! Sense of Wonder Science Fiction.

In 2018, her work was featured at the Pasadena History Museum as part of an exhibit titled "Dreaming the Universe: The Intersection of Science, Fiction, & Southern California."[30]

Bibliography

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Novels

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Collections

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  • Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1947)
  • The Artificial Man and Other Stories (Belt Publishing, February 2019, with an introduction by Brad Ricca)[12]

Short stories

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(Stories included in Away from the Here and Now).

(Included in The Artificial Man and Other Stories).

Essays

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Meet the Reclusive Woman Who Became a Pioneer of Science Fiction". Literary Hub. 2019-03-27. Retrieved 2019-03-27.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Clare Winger Harris," The Future is Female!, Library of America, accessed March 18, 2024.
  3. ^ a b Donawerth, Jane (1990). "Teaching Science Fiction by Women". The English Journal (subscription required). 79 (3): 39–46. doi:10.2307/819233. JSTOR 819233.
  4. ^ a b Davis, Cynthia J.; West, Kathryn (1996). Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline of Literary, Cultural, and Social History. Oxford University Press. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-19-509053-6.
  5. ^ Social Security Death Record for Clare Winger Harris, SS# 550-34-7527, accessed April 2, 2007.
  6. ^ a b "Clare Winger Harris" (in German). www.feministische-sf.de. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved 2009-08-03.
  7. ^ "Looking Around" by Kenney L. Ford," The Kansas Industrialist, Kansas State Agricultural College, volume 59, number 17, February 8, 1933, page 50.
  8. ^ a b c "Mrs. Frank Harris an Author," The Kansas Industrialist, Kansas State Agricultural College, volume 49, number 19, February 7, 1923, page 3.
  9. ^ a b Harris, Clare Winger (June 1927). "The Fate of the Poseidonia". Amazing Stories. pp. 245–252, 267.
  10. ^ a b "Curiosities by Richard A. Lupoff". Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. 1998. Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-30.
  11. ^ a b "The Artificial Man and Other Stories by Clare Winger Harris". tangentonline.com. Archived from the original on 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2019-03-27.
  12. ^ a b c "Upending Expectations about the Midwest: Belt Publishing's Revivals Series" by Dawn E. Bakken, Indiana Magazine of History, December 2021, Vol. 117 Issue 4, pages 312-314.
  13. ^ Letter/essay from Clare Winger Harris, Wonder Stories, August 1931. An excerpt of this letter is reprinted on Google Groups here Archived 2007-10-20 at the Wayback Machine, accessed March 30, 2007.
  14. ^ John Chute, Peter Nicholls, ed. (1993). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. St. Martin's Press. p. 544. ISBN 978-0-312-13486-0.
  15. ^ Utopian & Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference by Jane L. Donawerth, Syracuse University Press, 1994, page 144.
  16. ^ "The Pioneering Clare Winger Harris" by Andrew Liptak, Kirkus Reviews, July 2, 2015.
  17. ^ "Navigating the Weird Mind of Gertrude Barrows Bennett — the Mother of Dark Fantasy (pt. 1)," The Fandomentals, March 19, 2020.
  18. ^ "Introduction to Citadel of Fear" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens, Polaris Press, 1952.
  19. ^ Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science fiction, 1926-1965 by Eric Leif Davin, Lexington Books, 2006, page 29.
  20. ^ a b Donawerth, Jane (2006). "Illicit Reproduction: Clare Winger Harris's 'The Fate of the Poiseidonia'". In Justine Larbalestier (ed.). Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-6676-8.
  21. ^ The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women edited by Lisa Yaszek, Library of America, 2018.
  22. ^ "Review of 'Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird' edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf" by N.S. Ford, 10/31/2022.
  23. ^ Forrest J Ackerman's World of Science Fiction by Forrest J Ackerman, RR Donnelley & Sons, 1997, page 109.
  24. ^ "Science Fiction Timelines, 1920-30". Magic Dragon Multimedia. Retrieved 2007-03-30.
  25. ^ a b Harris, Clare Winger (April 1928). "The Miracle of the Lily". Amazing Stories. pp. 48–55.
  26. ^ Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science fiction, 1926-1965 by Eric Leif Davin, Lexington Books, 2006, page 221.
  27. ^ "Curiosities", F&SF, July 1998
  28. ^ Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction edited Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp, Wesleyan University Press, 2016.
  29. ^ "Vintage Treasures: TSR's Amazing Science Fiction Anthologies" by John ONeill, Black Gate, June 10, 2012.
  30. ^ "Pasadena History Museum • Dreaming the Universe". Pasadena Museum of History. Archived from the original on 2019-03-27. Retrieved 2019-03-27.
  31. ^ Moskowitz, Sam (June 1958). "How "Superman" Was Born". Future Science Fiction. 37: 122 – via Internet Archive.

Further reading

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Wikisource has original works by or about:
Clare Winger Harris

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