Oscar J. Friend

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Oscar Jerome Friend (born January 9, 1897 in St. Louis ; died January 19, 1963 in Levittown , Nassau County , New York ) was an American writer, editor, and literary agent.

Life

Friend was the son of Joseph Friend and Virginia Lillian, nee Dooley. He grew up in Fort Smith , Arkansas , where his father was a local pharmacist and druggist. After two years of apprenticeship as a pharmacist, Friend worked in his father's business from 1916 and ran it until 1936 after his death. In 1917 he married Irene Marquess Ozment, with whom he had two daughters. In 1936, Friend began working as a writer and editor for Popular Publications , which published a large number of pulp magazines of various genres, including several science fiction magazines, including Captain Future Magazine , Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories , for Friend worked as editor from 1941 to 1944. He also wrote detective and western stories for various magazines of the publisher.

After his time at Popular Publications , Friend worked from 1944 to 1946 as a screenwriter for Monogram Studios in Hollywood and as a freelance writer. After the death of Otis Adelbert Kline in 1946, he took over his literary agency Otis Kline Associates in Roslyn Heights , Nassau County. Kittie, the older daughter, later worked there and was the father's agent. Kline's best known clients included Robert E. Howard , the creator of Conan the Cimmerian . After Howard's death, a box with unfinished and unpublished manuscripts was stored by Friend, who left them to the fantasy author Lyon Sprague de Camp in 1952 , who brought them into publishable form and expanded them, thus establishing Howard's later fame.

Friend himself had written a number of horror, detective and western novels from the mid-1920s, often under the pseudonym Owen Fox Jerome. According to the memories of his daughter Kittie, his writing began with a particularly vivid nightmare, which he wrote down in the days that followed and turned it into a horror novel.

During Friends' time at Popular Publications , Leo Margulies was the editor of the magazine series. Between 1949 and 1958, Friend published four science fiction anthologies with Margulies .

bibliography

Novels
  • The Round Up (1924, Western)
  • The Bullet Eater (1925, Western)
  • Click of Triangle T (1925, Western)
  • The Wolf of Wildcat Mountain (1926, Western)
  • Gun Harvest (1927, republished 1948, Western)
  • The Hand Of Horror (1927, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Bloody Ground (1928, Western)
  • The Red Kite Clue (1928, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Domes of Silence (1929, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Golf Course Murders (1929, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Mississippi Hawk (1929, Western)
  • Half Moon Ranch (1931, Western)
  • The Murder at Avalon Arms (1931, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Range Maverick (1934, Western)
  • The Kid from Mars (1940, science fiction)
    • English: Man from Mars on a special mission. Weiss ( Utopian paperbacks ), 1956. Further edition: Moewig (Terra # 228), 1962.
  • Murder - As Usual (1942, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Corpse Awaits (1946, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Range Doctor (1948, Western)
  • Guns of Powder River (1950, Western, also as Ford Smith under the title Action at Powder River , 1963)
  • A Night at Club Baghdad (1950, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Double Life (1959, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Leave Everything to Me (1959, thriller, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Star Men (1963, science fiction)
Short stories
  • Footsteps in the Dark (1931, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Tibetan Horror (1938, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Of Jovian Build (1938)
  • Robot A-1 (1939)
  • Experiment with Destiny (1939)
  • Coup d'état (1939)
  • Mind Over Matter (1940)
  • Station Death (1940)
  • Roar of the Rocket (1940)
  • Glamor Girl — 2040 (1940)
  • The Worms Turn (1940)
  • The Impossible Highway (1940) also appeared as:
  • The Stolen Spectrum (1940)
  • Colossus from Space (1940, as Frank Johnson)
  • Jessamin's Death (1940)
  • Blind Victory (1941)
  • The Water World (1941)
  • This Is Hell (1942)
  • British Thermal Units (1942, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Meteorite Enigma (1942, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • The Molecule Monsters (1942)
  • Ali Baba, Junior (1942)
  • Venusian Quartz (1943)
  • Sun Engine (1943, as Owen Fox Jerome)
  • Venusian Nightmare (1944, as Ford Smith)
  • Gas Attack (1944, as Ford Smith)
  • The Serum Rubber Man (1944, as Ford Smith)
  • Helicopter Invasion (1944, as Ford Smith)
  • The Cosmic Chain (1945, as Ford Smith)
  • I Get Off Here (1945, as Ford Smith)
  • Are You There, Charlie? (1945, as Ford Smith)
  • Filterable Virus (1953)
  • Today Is Forever (1958, as Oscar Friend)
Anthologies (as editor, together with Leo Margulies)
  • From Off This World (1949)
  • My Best Science Fiction Story (1949)
  • The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction (1954)
  • Race to the Stars (1958)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robert Reginald and the ISFDB give a date of birth deviating from January 9, 1898, with the ISFDB referring to Reginald.
  2. ^ Robert Reginald : Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Detroit 1979, p. 905.
personal data
SURNAME Friend, Oscar J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Friend, Oscar Jerome (full name); Friend, Oscar (alternative spelling); Jerome, Owen Fox (pen name); Johnson, Frank (pseudonym); Smith, Ford (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, editor and literary agent
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Louis , Missouri
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1963
Place of death Levittown , Nassau County , New York