I’ve got three people I’m going to mention for birthdays on July 11. Hugh B. Cave, Cordwainer Smith, and Roy G. Krenkel.

Hugh B. Cave (1910-2004) wrote for the weird fiction pulps, the detecitve pulps (including Black Mask)  and other pulps. His early work was collected in Murgunsgtrumm and Others, one of the four titles published by Carcoas Press.  In the late nineties, Fedogan and Bremmer published collections of his early fiction. In 2000, Ash Tree Press published a collection of his ghost stories.

Cave moved to Jamaica after the Second World War. During this period he wrote for the women’s slick magazines such as Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal. After returning to the United States near the end of his life, he wrote horror. He drew on his experiences in Jamaica for much of this fiction, which included Voodoo. His biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales, was published in 2004.

Cordwainer Smith (1913-1966) was a science fiction writer like no other. His real name was Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. He only had a short career, but he had a major impact at the time. Most of his fiction was part of a vast future history known as The Instrumentality of Mankind.

In this future, animals are genetically changed so that they can talk and act at times like men. Stylistically, Smith’s works were unique. He employed stream of consciousness and odd terminology that gave his stories a feeling of strangeness and wonder that was different then anything that had come before and little that has followed. He only wrote one novel, Norstrilia. Smith had been with the diplomatic service iin Asia (if memory serves), and those experiences influenced his fiction. He was still actively writing when he died.

The last  person is a man who should be familiar to regular readers of this blog. Roy G. Krenkel (1918-1983) illustrated covers for some of the greatest fantasy and science fiction authors of the early and middle Twentieth Century, including Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Williamson.

Krenkel was quite prolific. Several books have been published collecting is art. I’m not going to try and discuss his art. It speaks for itself.

So, I’ll just provide some examples of his covers.