Miles J. Breuer

Miles John Breuer (January 3, 1889 – October 14, 1945) was an American physician and science fiction writer. He was part of the first generation of writers to appear regularly in the pulp science fiction magazines, publishing his first story, "The Man with the Strange Head", in the January 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. His best known works are his story "The Gostak and the Doshes," (1930) and his collaborative work with Jack Williamson, "The Girl from Mars" (1929) and The Birth of a New Republic (1931).

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Early life and medical career

Breuer was born in Chicago in 1889 to Charles and Barbara Breuer, Czech immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family moved to Nebraska in 1893 while Charles pursued a medical degree at Creighton University in Omaha, and Miles grew up in the Czech community of Crete, Nebraska. Miles graduated from Crete High School in 1906, and went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Texas in 1911. After earning a medical degree from Rush Medical College at the University of Chicago in 1915, Miles joined his father's medical practice in Nebraska. In 1916 Miles married Julia Strejic and the couple had three children, Rosalie, Stanley, and Mildred.

During World War I Miles Breuer served for twenty months in France as a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps. Rejoining his father's medical practice after the war, Breuer contributed frequent medical articles to Czech-language newspapers, as well as a monthly health column in the country's largest Czech-language agricultural monthly. In 1925 he published a handbook called Index of Physiotherapeutic Technic, cataloging a variety of methods for physical therapy. Breuer suffered a nervous breakdown in December 1942, and shortly afterwards moved to Los Angeles, where he continued his medical practice until 1945, when he died after a brief illness.[1]

Writing career

Breuer's first published work of fiction was a Czech-language story called "The Man Without an Appetite" that appeared in the monthly Bratrsky Vestnik in 1916. Breuer had long been interested in scientific romances, particularly those of H. G. Wells.[2] When Hugo Gernsback founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, Breuer began writing and submitting stories, publishing his first, "The Man with the Strange Head", in the January 1927 issue. Breuer went on to publish a total of thirty-six stories and two novels in the science fiction magazines over the next fifteen years, including collaborations with Jack Williamson and Clare Winger Harris.

Several of Breuer's stories were anthologized over the years, and in 2008 Michael R. Page of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln edited The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories, which included ten stories, the novel Paradise and Iron, and Breuer's editorial essay "The Future of Scientifiction".

Jack Williamson called Breuer "among the first and best of the amateurs whose work Gernsback began to print."[3] Walter Gillings stated that Breuer wrote "some of the most intriguing tales that appeared in the early volumes of Amazing Stories,"[4] and John Clute described his work as crudely written, but intelligent and noted for new ideas.[5]

Works by Miles J. Breuer

Short stories

Novels

Poems

Essays

References

  1. ^ Obituary, Lincoln Evening Journal, October 16, 1945.
  2. ^ The Man With the Strange Head, Introduction by Michael R. Page, 2008, p. xvii.
  3. ^ Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction by Jack Williamson, 2nd ed., 2005, pp. 61-62.
  4. ^ "Miles J. Breuer," Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, ed. Curtis C. Smith, 2nd ed., 1986, pp. 78-79.
  5. ^ "Miles J. Breuer," The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1993, p. 157.

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