American Decades
Campbell, John W., Jr. 1910-1971
SCIENCE-FICTION WRITER AND MAGAZINE EDITOR
Influential Editor.
The term golden age is used with great frequency to refer to popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s, whether referring to radio, comic books, or science fiction. Rarely, however, can such a golden age be as closely identified with the work of one person as the science-fiction golden age can with John W. Campbell, Jr. During the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s he was the most influential editor in the field, discovering impressive new talents and pushing the genre to a level more sophisticated than that of most previous American science fiction, which relied heavily on adventure formulas and gadgetry.
From Writer to Editor.
Campbell began writing science fiction while in his teens and published his first stories before completing his studies in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University. He built a name for...
[The entire page is 840 words long]
1940's Media
