Norman L. Knight | |
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| Born | Norman Louis Knight (1895-09-21)21 September 1895 |
| Died | 19 April 1972(1972-04-19) (aged 76) Adventist Hospital Takoma Park, Maryland, US |
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| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1937–1967 |
| Genre | Science fiction,Fantasy |
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Norman Louis Knight (September 21, 1895 – April 19, 1972) was an American chemist and writer offantasy andscience fiction.[1]
Knight was born inSt. Joseph, Missouri on September 21, 1895, at 2109 Messanie Road. His father Louis Ruthven Knight was a druggist, and the family - including his mother Mary E. Knight (née Stauber) - lived over his drugstore.
Knight joined the US Army in 1917 and was sent to France, where his service was interrupted by a bout of influenza. Upon recovering, he was assigned to carry messages between commands via horseback with the Signal Corps. After the war, he joined the nascent National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa, where he met his future wife Marie Sarah Yenn. They had one child, a girl named Paula Marie.
Knight's writing career was relatively abbreviated, consisting almost entirely of stories published inAstounding between 1937 and 1942; these included two serialized novellas. He briefly emerged from retirement between 1965 and 1967 with the novelA Torrent of Faces, co-written withJames Blish. Very modern in style and outlook compared to Knight'sGolden Age fiction, the novel saw numerous reprints, and was featured in theAce Science Fiction Specials line.[2] It remains Knight's most prominent work. Several of its chapters, published independently inGalaxy Magazine in 1965 as the novelette "The Shipwrecked Hotel", were nominated for the 1966NebulaAward.
Despite his commercial success in the pulps, Knight never receive much attention, and has since fallen into obscurity. One of his few early works to draw critical notice was the 1939 storySaurian Valedictory, which was praised byEdmond Hamilton andLeigh Brackett as "one of the really great stories on alien mentality", while lamenting that it was "a brilliant achievement, and nobody seems to have heard of it, or him. It was an attempt to depict a reptilian civilization before Man. It succeeded triumphantly; the values were all so different, the psychology".[3]
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