This birthday post is a little different. Wallace West (1900-1980) was born on May 22. We are not related, at least as far as I know.

I’ve seen his name a time or two before, so when it appeared on the ISFDB list of today’s birthdays, I thought I would see what he had written.

It turns out that with the exception of a story published in 1978, he stopped writing in the late 1960s. And that story may have been written years earlier. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Wallace West started writing in the late twenties with sales to Weird Tales. He worked in public relations and was one of the first writers to be concerned about pollution. Most of his work was at shorter lengths. He had a few novels published after the Second World War, but they were mostly fix-ups of some of his short fiction.

After the war, much of West’s fiction was published in magazines edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes.  He never really hit the top paying markets very often, but there were at least two appearances in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the 1950. I don’t know how this particular pulp ranked as far as pay was concerned, but it was one of the best science fiction pulps of the post war years.

I’ve not read any of his work, at least that I’m aware of. I think I would remember reading something by someone with the same surname as I have. I do, however, have copies of some os  his stories. I’ve got electronic copies of the original run of Weird Tales. Plus a few of  his stories were reprinted in anthologies that I have picked up over the years but haven’t gotten around to reading.

I’ll be checking them out.