Victor Rousseau Emanuel

For the Belgian sculptor see Victor Rousseau.

Victor Rousseau Emanuel (1879–1960) was a writer of pulp fiction who was active in Great Britain and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote under the pen names Victor Rousseau and H. M. Egbert.

Life

Emanuel first came to the U.S. in 1901. He also lived in Canada from 1912 to 1916, a period during which he wrote most of his best works. Although he began his career as a novelist, he gained popularity for his works of pulp fiction.[1]

After an early career as a reporter for the New York World and as an editor of Harper's Weekly, he became a fiction writer. He wrote in a variety of genres, including historical fiction, frontier stories, western romance and crime fiction, but was probably best known as an early exponent of science fiction and fantasy. His best known novels in those genres were The Messiah of the Cylinder, a story of a man placed in suspended animation for 100 years,[2] and The Eye of Balamok, a lost-race novel. Several of his stories were adapted for Western films, and he was the author of one silent film screenplay, The Devil's Tower, based on one of his stories.

Work

He began his career as a novelist with the book The Devil Chair (1914), which is a story of the invention of a gyroscopic wheel that spins its occupant at great speeds. His followed this with The Sea Demons (1916), a tale of the human race threatened by a sea monster. Another of his science fiction works was Draught of Eternity (1918), a work with a ruined New York as its locale.[1]

He also wrote at least the first three and possibly the first fifteen or so "Jim Anthony, Super Detective" novels. Jim Anthony was a short-lived pulp hero created in imitation of Doc Savage.

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Rousseau, Victor". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  2. ↑ Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. Springer, 1999. ISBN 0387985719 (p. 11).

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