This is the second birthday post for today. It’s on Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), if you couldn’t tell from the title. The first birthday post was on Isaac Asimov.

Beaumont couldn’t have been more different than Asimov.  Where Asimov focused on science, often at the expense of the humanity of his characters (it’s been said), Beuamont was a master at crafting believable, individual characters. But then Asimov wrote science fiction, whereas Beaumont primarily wrote fantasy.

Beaumont was a protege of Ray Bradbury, something I’ve commented on before. That’s not to say Beaumont was inferior to Bradbury. He wasn’t, although he was to soem extent a different kind of writer.  For a compasrison of two stories written by Beaumont and Bradbury from the same prompt, see this post.

What I want to focus on today is Beaumont as short fiction writer.

Beaumont was a member of what has come to be known as the California school.  These are all writers who lived and wrote at one time or another in southern California, primarily in the Los Angeles area. The group included at times Bradubry, Beaumonnt, William F. Nolan, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Chad Oliver, a young Dennis Etchison (who took a writiing classs from Beaumont), and at least peripherally, Harlan Ellison.  I’m not sure Robert Bloch would be included in this group. By the time he moved to Los Angeles (after the success of the film version of Psycho, IIRC), he had been an established writer for over two decades.

These men are my heroes when it comes to writng short stories and novellettes.

While all of these writers at least attempted a novel and some wrote more than one successful novel (Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver), they were primarily short fiction writers for much if not all of their careers. This was after the heydey of hte pulps, although in the early fifites, there were some still around. But their sun was setting.

But for a body of work produced by someone who didn’t live to be forty, Beaumont was probably, arguably the best. He died of some type of condition that resembled early onset Alzheimer’s, although I’m not certain that was the exact diagnosis. Both Bradubry and Christopher Beaumont have written about the richness of Charles Beaumont’s ideas and how driven he was to write.

Did he have some subconscious knowledge of how short his life would be that compelled him to write? We can only speculate.

Beaumont is a writer I return to every few years. Both for entertainment and for inspiration. The breadth of his themes and topics can be impressive. I don’t usually have trouble comiong up with a story idea, but then I’ve gotten into the habit of writing into the dark with most of my fiction.

Beaumont wrote many of the now classic episodes of the original Twilight Zone. Between him and Matheson, I think they wrote more than any of the writers Rod Serling brought in for the show. If you’ve watched much of the show in either reruns or on DVD/Blue Ray, then you’ve seen his work.

So tonight, I’ll raise a glass to Charles Beaumont’s legacy.