Paul Corey

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Paul Frederick Corey (born July 8, 1903 in Marne , Shelby County , Iowa ; died December 17, 1992 in Sonoma , California ) was an American writer. He is known for his novels set in the rural American Midwest . He has also written a science fiction novel, several books for young people and a number of guides on house building and related topics.

Life

Corey was born in 1903 on his parents' farm near the small town of Marne, the youngest of seven children. His parents were the farmer Edwin Olney Corey and the teacher Margaret Morgan, nee Brown. His father died when Corey was two years old, but the mother, with the help of the older brothers, managed to keep the 160-acre farm running. At fourteen, he moved to Atlantic with his mother and an older brother , where he graduated from high school in 1921. He then studied at the University of Iowa , where he made his BA in journalism in 1925 .

After his studies, he worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Chicago , but after a few months moved to New York where he worked for the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1927 to 1928 and for the National Encyclopaedia from 1930 to 1931 . He has also written for Real Estate Record and Builder's Guide . In 1928 he married the poet Ruth Lechlitner, with whom he spent a year in Europe. They then settled in Cold Spring , New York , where Corey built a house, raised chickens, and worked as a writer.

A first short story, Their Forefathers Were Presidents , was published in 1934 . Numerous other “proletarian” short stories followed by the end of the 1930s. His rural trilogy Three Miles Square (1939), The Road Returns (1940) and County Seat (1941) was made during the Cold Spring period. In 1941 a daughter was born. In 1942 he worked as a specialist in guerrilla warfare at the Tactical School of the First Service Command in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. He got this job through an article in Look magazine , “Hitler Can Invade America by Air”.

In 1947 the family moved to Sonoma, California, where Corey built another house and continued writing. According to his own statement, however, the McCarthy era ended his career as a fiction writer for the time being . He therefore wrote several non-fiction books in the following years, mainly on do-it-yourself house building and carpentry, and gave courses on house building at Napa Valley College in Napa . In addition to his literary work, he was an active animal rights activist , environmental activist and representative of liberal political positions. For many years he worked intensively for the protection of the pumas in the California mountains. In addition, he was a lifelong cat friend and observer, identified by numerous relevant writings.

Corey turned to science fiction late, though he had long had a desire to write SF. It was not until 1962 that a first SF short story, Operation Survival , appeared in the British SF magazine New Worlds after numerous American publishers had rejected its stories. In 1969, Corey's first and only SF novel The Planet of the Blind was published , which was also translated into German under the title Die Radarwelt . He tells of a man in a world of technically advanced blind people and thus takes up the motif of the sighted among the blind from HG Wells ' The Country of the Blind (1904).

His extensive estate is now in the holdings of the University of Iowa Library . The SF novel and one of his youth books were translated into German. His work can be considered completely forgotten today.

bibliography

Farm trilogy
  • Three Miles Square (1939)
  • The Road Returns (1940)
  • County Seat (1941)
Novels
  • Acres of Antaeus (1946)
  • Corn Gold Farm (1948)
  • The Planet of the Blind (1969)
    • German: The radar world . Translated by Bodo Baumann. Bastei Lübbe SF # 6, 1972.
Short stories (selection)
  • Their Forefathers Were Presidents (1934)
  • The Farmer and the Gold Stone (ca.1935)
  • Operation Survival (1962, in: New Worlds Science Fiction, # 125 December )
  • If You're So Smart (1969, in: John Carnell (Ed.): New Writings in SF 14 )
  • Red Carpet Treatment (in: The Diversifier, # 23 November 1977 )
Youth books
  • The Red Tractor (1944)
  • Five Acre Hill (1946)
    • English: The five morning hill. Paul Meyer, Bremen 1949, OCLC 38698992 .
  • The Little Jeep (1946)
  • Shad Haul (1947)
  • Milk Flood (1956)
Non-fiction
  • Buy an Acre: America's Second Frontier (1944)
  • Build a Home (1946)
  • Homemade Homes (1950)
  • Holiday Homes (1967, also as How to Build Country Homes on a Budget , 1975)
  • Bachelor Bess: My Sister (1975)
  • Do cats think? : Notes of a Cat-Watcher (1977)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Robert Reginald : Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Detroit 1979, p. 864
personal data
SURNAME Corey, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Corey, Paul Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Marne , Shelby County , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH 17th December 1992
Place of death Sonoma , California