Hans Otto Storm (1895–1941) was a German American writer, novelist and radio engineer.[1] His reputation quickly faded into obscurity after his early death, but in the 1940s received some positive praise from the legendary literary critic Edmund Wilson.[2]
Storm was born in Bloomington, California to German parents who were refugees fleeing anti-socialist fervor in Germany following the failed Revolutions of 1848.[3] He studied engineering at Stanford University and went into the newly emerging field of radio. He traveled in south and central America, including long spells in Nicaragua and Peru.[3] He served two years with an American Army Hospital during WWI.[3] He died of accidental electrocution December 11, 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbor, while rushing to complete a large radio transformer for the Army Signal Corps in a laboratory in San Francisco.[1][3]
His first novel, Full Measure (1929), is about industrial expansion and is strongest on the subject of radio engineering and equipment.[1] It "received mildly positive reviews but sold little over a thousand copies."[1] His next novel, Pity the Tyrannt (1937) is about an American engineer who becomes involved in a Peruvian revolution.[1] Edmund Wilson considered it his best work.[2] The Tyrant of the title is based on Augusto Leguía, President of Peru from 1919 to 1930, "whose rule was marked by rebellion, suppression of his opponents, and widespread corruption."[1] His next novel, Made in the USA (1939) is a "social fable" (Edmund Wilson)[2] about a tramp steamer full of passengers that becomes stuck on a sand-bar in the South Pacific.[1] Civilized behavior deteriorates and the passengers break into two warring camps. His last novel, Count Ten (1940) is his longest, it follows thirty years of the life of "Eric Marsden".[1] In Edmund Wilson’s estimation, the novel is "very much inferior on the whole to the ones that had gone before."[2] He also thought that it showed "what seemed internal evidence of having been written earlier than they," giving off the air of "one of those autobiographical novels that young men begin in college and carry around for years in old trunks."[2]