I’m pleased to present Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright (1874-1965), by leading H.P. Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr.

Ken had shown me the private PDF of his genealogical text before Christmas, and I suggested that a few historians and some fiction readers in the West Midlands would be interested in this local writer, if I could add a biographical introduction and more images. He agreed to the expansion and that it could be made public. This 26-page PDF is the result, now freely available for download.

Download: fowler_wright_genealogy_life.pdf

S. Fowler Wright was a key writer in the history of early science-fiction. To earn money for his family he was also a popular crime-mystery writer of the 1930s and 40s. He was raised in Smethwick and then lived in north Birmingham. As a seminal imaginative writer and as a Birmingham man interested in Mercian history he was thus very much a contemporary of Tolkien, and he even went to the same school in New Street. I suspect a connection with Arnold Bennett, and note that Wright apparently advised Churchill on certain matters during wartime (see PDF for details). S. Fowler Wright’s biography remains to be written. I won’t be the one to write it, so feel free.