Jack Snow (writer)
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John Frederick "Jack" Snow (August 15, 1907 – July 13, 1956) was a radio writer and scholar of the works of L. Frank Baum. When Baum died in 1919, the twelve-year-old Snow offered to be the next Royal Historian of Oz, but was politely turned down by a staffer at Baum's publisher, Reilly & Lee. Snow eventually wrote two Oz books: The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) and The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949) as well as Who's Who in Oz (1954), a thorough guide to the Oz characters.
In his second year in high school, the precocious Snow created the first radio review column in American journalism, in The Cincinnati Enquirer.[1] After graduation, Snow pursued a career in print journalism and primarily in radio, with periods in teachers college and the U. S. Army. He named the Ohio radio station WING, and spent seven years with the National Broadcasting Company in New York.
Snow also wrote a short story, "A Murder in Oz," for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but the editors rejected it, and it was posthumously published in The Baum Bugle. That story has been published in a collection titled Spectral Snow, which collects several of the horror stories Snow sold to popular magazines, such as Weird Tales.[2] Dark Music and Other Spectral Tales was an earlier such collection, published in 1947. There is a good deal of overlap, but each anthology contains stories not found in the other. The eponymous story has been anthologized in other collections.
There have been rumors over the years of a third unpublished Oz book by Snow, entitled Over the Rainbow to Oz (involving either Polychrome, the rainbow's daughter, or an early history of Oz), but no manuscript has ever been discovered.
Snow's address book of Oz fans, discovered after he died, became the basis of the mailing that established The International Wizard of Oz Club.
The Baum Bugle winter 1987 issue contains biographical and bibliographical information about Snow as well as critical analysis of his horror output.
He is buried in an unmarked grave in Piqua, Ohio. According to David Maxine in Spectral Snow, Snow was a pariah in the community for his homosexuality.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jack Snow, Who's Who in Oz, Chicago, Reilly & Lee, 1954; New York, Peter Bedrick Books, 1988; p. 276.
- ^ Snow published five stories in Weird Tales over the space of two decades: "Night Wings," Sept. 1927; "Poison," Dec. 1928; "Second Childhood," March 1945; "Seed," 1946; and "Midnight," May 1946. Sheldon Jaffrey and Fred Cook, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, Bowling Green, OH, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985; p. 116.
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