Manly Wade Wellman (May 21, 1903 – April 5, 1986) was an American writer. While his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown and Strange Stories, Wellman is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to the legendary Weird Tales and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as "the dean of fantasy writers." Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, detective fiction, western fiction, juvenile fiction, and non-fiction.
Wellman was a long-time resident of North Carolina. He received many awards, including the World Fantasy Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 2013, the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation inaugurated an award named after him to honor other North Carolina authors of science fiction and fantasy.
Three of Wellman's most famous recurring protagonists are John, a.k.a. John the Balladeer, a.k.a. "Silver John", a wandering backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar; the elderly "occult detective" Judge Pursuivant; and John Thunstone, also an occult investigator.
Wellman wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Gabriel Barclay, Levi Crow, Gans T. Field, Hampton Wells, and Wade Wells.
Wellman was born in the village of Kamundongo, near the city of Silva Porto in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola). Wellman's father, Frederick Creighton Wellman, was stationed in the village as a medical officer. He spoke a local language before he learned English, and became an adopted son of a powerful chief whose vision Dr Wellman restored. As a small child, Manly twice visited London, where the family stayed in Torrington Square (obliterated during the Battle of Britain). When he was still a young boy, his family moved to the United States, where he attended school in Washington, D.C., and prep school in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Fairmount College (now Wichita State University in Kansas) with a BA in English in 1926, he received a Bachelor of Literature degree from the School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1927. A distinguished football player, he received little encouragement from either family or teachers for his plans to become a writer. An early story, "Back to the Beast", resulted in one teacher remarking "Your work is impossible!" Yet this same story became his first professional sale when editor Farnsworth Wright bought it and published it in Weird Tales (November 1927).
He was of partial Native American ancestry. According to the author note by Gahan Wilson in Gahan Wilson, ed. First World Fantasy Awards (NY: Doubleday, 1977, p. 253), Wellman's "ancestry reaches back through the Confederate South to colonial Virginia, with the potent infusion of Gascon French and American Indian."
Wellman cited the writers Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, Lafcadio Hearn and Johannes V. Jensen as influences on his own work.
One of Wellman's brothers, Paul Wellman, was also a well published author; another, Frederick Lovejoy Wellman, was a noted plant pathologist.
His first published story, "When the Lion Roared" (Thrilling Tales, May 1927), was based on the stories told to him in his African childhood upbringing. Wellman's first science fiction novel, The Invading Asteroid, was published in 1929 but he would not work at full length again until 1941.
Around that time he started a friendship with Vance Randolph, an acclaimed folklorist and expert on Ozark mountain magic and traditions. Randolf took Wellman on trips through the Arkansas Ozarks, learning folk traditions and meeting the secluded people of the American back country. It was through Randolph that Wellman met North Carolinian folk music legend Obray Ramsey, whose music would have a profound effect on Wellman and his writing.
In the late 1920s, during the silent film era, Wellman wrote movie reviews for the Wichita Beacon and also worked for The Wichita Eagle as a court and crime reporter. He sold many stories in this period to Ozark Stories and Thrilling Tales. He married Frances Obrist on June 14, 1930. Writing under the pen name "Garfield", she became a horror writer in her own right when she sold her first story to Weird Tales in 1939. During the Depression, Wellman's newspaper work started to dwindle, so in 1934 he moved from Kansas to New York City where he became assistant director of the WPA's New York Folklore Project.
Alfred Bester described meeting Wellman in about 1939: "Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... The vivacious compère of those luncheons was Manley [sic] Wade Wellman, a professional Southerner full of regional anecdotes. It's my recollection that one of his hands was slightly shriveled, which may have been why he came on so strong for the Confederate cause. We were all very patient with that; after all, our side won the war. Wellman was quite the man-of-the-world for the innocent thirties; he always ordered wine with his lunch."
Moving from New York to New Jersey in 1939, Wellman wrote countless stories for the new field of comic books as well as for the pulps. During the war he served in New Jersey as a first lieutenant.
The 1940s: New York, Weird Tales, occult detectives and comic books
In the 1930s and 1940s, Wellman began selling to the bigger publications such as Weird Tales, Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories. At this time, when Wellman was living in New York, Weird Tales published numerous stories based on three of his most famous characters: Judge Pursuivant, John Thunstone, and Professor Nathan Enderby.
Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant (written under the pen name Gans T. Fields) is described as "a renowned scholar and retired judge, hero of World War I, and now hero of darker, more dangerous battles. Huge of frame, an epicure, an authority on the occult, Pursuivant strides forth from his reclusive home in West Virginia to confront evil wherever it appears."
John Thunstone is "a hulking Manhattanite playboy and dilettante, a serious student of the occult and a two-fisted brawler ready to take on any enemy. Armed with potent charms and a silver swordcane, Thunstone stalks supernatural perils in the posh night clubs and seedy hotels of New York, or in backwater towns lost in the countryside-- seeking out deadly sorcery as a hunter pursues a man-killer beast." Thunstone's arch-nemesis was the evil sorcerer Rowley Thorne. Thorne was based on the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world".
The lesser-known character Professor Nathan Enderby is a "slender savant and unassuming authority on the supernatural, aided by his sharp wits and his Chinese servant, Quong. His cabin in rural Pennsylvania is a retreat from the frenetic social life of New York City – and a fortress against the powers of black magic."