Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was the pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly science fiction. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

Biography.

Leinster was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins. His father was an accountant. Although both parents were born in Virginia, the family lived in Manhattan in 1910, according to the 1910 Federal Census. A high school dropout, he nevertheless began a career as a freelance writer before World War I.

He was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, “The Foreigner,” appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine; in a September 2022 interview, Leinster’s daughter stated that Mencken recommended using a pseudonym for non-Smart Set content. During World War I, Leinster served with the Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917–1918).

During and after the war, his work began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories, and Breezy Stories. He continued to be published regularly in Argosy into the 1950s. When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales, and even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.