Today marks the anniversaries of two favorite writers, men who are no strangers to readers of Adventures Fantastic or fans of classic pulp and adventure literature.  They are Rafael Sabatini and Jack Williamson.  Plus a third pulpster whose work I’ve not read much of yet.

Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini was born on April 29 in 1875.  He passed away in 1950.  Sabatini’s work was firmly in the historical adventure camp.  He wrote little if any stories of a fantastic nature.

Sabatini researched the time periods of his works.  The result was an authenticity that was missing from many other historical fiction writers of the period.  He’s best known for such swashbucklers as Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Black Swan, and Scaramouche.

Sabatini’s work was intelligent and well thought out.  I read several of the stories in his collection The Justice of the Duke over Christmas.  This series of stories concern Cesare Borgia.  I thoroughly enjoyed the ones I read.  They were clever and usually involved some type of twist at the end.

Most of Sabatini’s work is available in multiple electronic formats.

Jack Williamson

The second favorite author born on this day is Jack Williamson.  He was born in 1908 and passed away in 2006.  Williamson wrote both fantasy and science fiction.  It was through his science fiction that I first came to his writings, and that is what he’s best known for.  But his early work for the pulps had some strong fantasy tales as part of it.  I’ve looked at Golden Blood and “Wolves of Darkness” recently.  Earlier in the month, I traveled to Portales to attend the Jack Williamson Lectureship.  Currently I’m reading Darker Than You Think.  I’m only a few chapters into it, and the end of the semester crunch is upon me, so it might be a few weeks before I can get the review posted.

Future titles on the docket include Reign of Wizardry and The Legion of Space novels.  Williamson’s work can be divided into roughly two periods, before he got his doctorate in English and after.  The before stuff includes the work he did for the pulps and the science fiction magazines such as Astounding in the 1940s.  The later works were mostly novels (because that was the way you made a living, although he still wrote plenty of short stories).  I’ll be reading some of them, although I don’t know yet which ones.

Finally, there are several other birthdays today, including Humphrey Carter, Tony Rothman, Robert J. Sawyer, Alexander Jablokov, and Robert Kroese.  However, there’s one other who is primarily only known in pulp circles today.

H. Bedford-Jones.  He was born in 1877 and died in 1949.  He was a prolific pulpster.  His work is slowly coming back into print through small presses such as Wildside and Black Dog Books.  James Reasoner is a fan.  A few days ago, Howard Andrew Jones posted about his novel Flamehair.  I’ve got a collection of his work from Wildside that I’m hoping to work into the rotation.