Robert Stallman (writer)

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Robert Lester Stallman (born January 6, 1930 in Kankakee , Illinois ; died August 1, 1980 in Kalamazoo , Michigan ) was an American author, literary critic, and English scholar. He is known as an author for Werwelt , a trilogy of novels that can be classified between science fiction and horror literature .

Life

Stallman was a professor of English at Western Michigan University . His first novel The Orphan (in German translation as Werwelt: The Foundling ) appeared in 1980. It is about a strange creature, which - like Superman - takes place in an alien world of men and trying to find in her a place. This creature has the ability to transform: on the one hand it appears as a child and later as an adolescent, on the other hand it is a being with superhuman strength, a "beast" that perceives its environment with far superior human senses and reacts more strongly to elementary affects. The apparent child is taken in by a married couple - Catherine ( Aunt Cat ) and Martin Nordmeyer - who live on a farm in the Midwest during the Great Depression . But over and over again in the course of its development - partly as a result of its deliberately uncontrolled transformation into the beast - incidents that end tragically sometimes. The metamorphosis is at the same time a metamorphosis in the biological - with which the novel belongs to science fiction - and one in the mythopoetic sense - with which themes from horror novels (werewolf) and fantasy ( "Beauty and the Beast" ) are taken up.

In the year The Orphan was published , Stallman died of cancer at the age of 50. The novel was highly praised as a poetically dense and literarily sophisticated take on the werewolf theme - John R. Pfeiffer, for example, spoke of a “stunning book” - and was nominated in 1981 for the Nebula Award and the Balrog Award . At the Locus Award , The Orphan came 2nd in the Roman category . The author was a finalist in the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1981 and 1982 .

The last two volumes of the Werwelt trilogy appeared posthumously . In the last volume in particular, Peter Nicholls missed a revision that the late author could no longer afford.

bibliography

Book of the Beast / Werwelt
  • 1 The Orphan (1980)
  • 2 The Captive (1981)
  • 3 The Beast (1982, also as The Book of the Beast )

German collective edition (Vols. 1–3):

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Stallman, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stallman, Robert Lester
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author, literary critic and English scholar
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Kankakee , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1980
Place of death Kalamazoo , Michigan