Bernard Wolfe

Bernard Wolfe (August 28, 1915, New Haven, Connecticut – October 27, 1985, Calabasas, California) was an American writer.

Wolfe was educated at Yale University, and worked in the United States Merchant Marine during the 1930s; in 1937 he served briefly as secretary to Leon Trotsky during the latter's exile in Mexico.^[1] During World War II he was employed as a military correspondent by a number of science magazines, and then in 1946 he began to write fiction. Wolfe was the co-writer of musician Milton Mezzrow's autobiography Really The Blues.

Limbo

He wrote several novels, and plays, mostly for television, but is known primarily for his 1952 science-fiction novel Limbo. Because Limbo was set in the then-distant future of 1990, the original British edition is titled Limbo '90. The publisher claimed that Wolfe had written "the first book of science-fiction to project the present-day concept of 'cybernetics' to its logical conclusion".^[2] David Pringle selected Limbo for inclusion in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.^[3] J.G. Ballard praised Wolfe's "lucid intelligence" and claimed Limbo helped encourage him to start writing fiction. ^[4]Boucher and McComas, however, received the novel poorly, calling it "pretentious hodgepodge" and describing its theme as "a symbolically interesting idea . . . never developed with consistent or convincing details."^[5] P. Schuyler Miller gave Limbo a mixed review, describing it as a "colossus of a novel" while faulting its "endless talk."^[6]

Select bibliography

Nonfiction

• Really The Blues (1946)
• Hypnotism Comes of Age (1949) ^[7]

Novels and collections

• Limbo (1952)
• The Late Risers, Their Masquerade (1954)
• In Deep (1957)
• The Great Prince Died (also published as Trotsky Dead) (1959)
• The Magic of Their Singing (1961)
• Come On Out, Daddy (1963)
• Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up (short story collection)(1968)
• Logan's Gone (1974)
• Lies (1975)

Short stories

Many of his short stories were published by Playboy Magazine, and two stories placed in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology.

• "The Never Ending Penny", originally published in Playboy Magazine, 1960

External links

• Bernard Wolfe at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

References