The witchcraft reader
American Occult fiction, English Occult fiction, Fiction, Occult fiction, American, Occult fiction, English
Peter Haining, Keith Roberts, A. E. van Vogt, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, John Brunner
Keith John Kingston Roberts (20 September 1935 – 5 October 2000) was an English science fiction author. He began publishing with two stories in the September 1964 issue of Science Fantasy magazine, "Anita" (the first of a series of stories featuring a teenage modern witch and her eccentric granny) and "Escapism".[1][2] -Wikipedia || Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to become a full-time writer, and he went on to write a large number of short stories. In 1944 he moved to Hollywood, California. In the 1950s he briefly became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics projects. Although he left Dianetics, he claimed that Hubbard's followers continued to harass him, and he stopped writing for a few years. In the 1960s Frederik Pohl convinced him to start writing again, and he wrote novels (as opposed to short stories that were later developed into novels) until his death in 2000. || Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having coined the term. 

**Source**: [Fritz Leiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Leiber) on Wikipedia. || Richard Matheson was born in Allendale, New Jersey, the son of Norwegian immigrant parents.  He was raised in Brooklyn and started writing at age eight.  He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1943.  He served as an infantry soldier in World War II.   He earned his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1949.  His first short story, "Born of Man and Woman," appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950.  Between 1950 and 1971, he wrote dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of science fiction, horror and fantasy.  In 1951 he moved to California and became a screenwriter, writing episodes for The Twilight Zone, Lawman, and Star Trek, and screenplays for horror movies such as The Devil Rides Out and Steven Spielberg's Duel.  During the 1950s he published a handful of Western stories.  His autobiographical war novel The Beardless Warriors was published in 1960. || Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York.  He changed his name in 1929, choosing Sturgeon to match his mother's surname after her second marriage, and "Theodore" to match his nickname, "Teddy."  His mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Felix Sturgeon.

As an adolescent, Sturgeon wanted to be a circus acrobat, but then had an episode of rheumatic fever.  From 1935 to 1938, he was a sailor in the merchant marine. He sold his first story in 1938, and his first science fiction story, "Ether Breather" was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939.  A few of his early pulp stories were published under the pseudonym "E. Waldo Hunter."  

He married his first wife, Dorothe Fillingame, in 1940.  That year, they moved to the West Indies, where Sturgeon managed a hotel for about a year.  He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and in 1944 he returned to the U.S. and worked as an advertising copywriter.  He divorced in 1945, and married singer Mary Mair in 1949 until an annulment in 1951.  In 1950, he published his first novel, The Dreaming Jewels.  In 1951, he married Marion McGahan and they had a son in 1952, a daughters in 1954, a daughter in 1956, and a son in 1960.  In 1963, he ghost-wrote the Ellery Queen mystery novel The Player on the Other Side, which received critical praise.  He wrote two screenplays for the television show Star Trek in 1966 and 1967, and one screenplay for the show Land of the Lost in 1975, and two of his stories were adapted for The New Twilight Zone.  At the height of his popularity in the 1950s he was the most anthologized author alive.

His last long-term committed relationship was with writer and educator Jayne Engelhart Tannehill, with whom he remained until the time of his death.  He died in May of 1985 of lung fibrosis, in Eugene, Oregon. || Robert Albert Bloch was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of German-Jewish Americans.  During the 1930s, he was an avid reader of Weird Tales magazine and H. P. Lovecraft in particular.  He wrote to Lovecraft, who responded with advice on writing, and Bloch sold his first published short story, "The Feast in the Abbey" to Weird Tales when he was just seventeen.  He continued to write for Weird Tales and went on to become one of its most popular authors, while also contributing to other magazines.  In 1946, his first published novel, The Scarf, was released.  He received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1959 for “That Hell-Bound Train” (1958).  Also in 1959, he published one of his best-known novels, Psycho, which was adapted for the screen in 1960 by Joseph Stefano, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  He wrote the screenplay for the movie The Night Walker (1964), and he also wrote three scripts for the television show Star Trek.  Over the course of his career, he wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, mostly in the crime fiction, science fiction and, horror fiction genres. || Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative. 

Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, *The Martian Chronicles*, *The Illustrated Man*, *Fahrenheit 451* and *Something Wicked This Way Comes*, are masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime. His timeless, constant appeal to audiences young and old has proven him to be one of the truly classic authors of the 20th Century -- and the 21st. 

In recognition of his stature in the world of literature and the impact he has had on so many for so many years, Bradbury was awarded the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an the National Medal of Arts in 2004. 

([Source][1])


  [1]: http://www.raybradbury.com/about.html || British author of science fiction novels and stories.