Manly Wade Wellman(1903-1986)

Manly Wade Wellman was born on May 21, 1903, in Kamundongo, Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), where his father, Dr. Frederick Creighton Wellman, was a physician at a British medical outpost. It was there that he first encountered African tales of magic and the spirit world, a fascination that would stay with him for life. His first story published, "The Lion Roared" (Thrilling Tales, 1927), was based on the stories told to him in his African childhood upbringing.

He later moved to the US, going to grade school in Washington, DC, prep school in Salt Lake City and college at Wichita, Kansas, where he received a BA in English in 1926. Around that time he started a friendship with Vance Randolf, an acclaimed folklorist and expert on Ozark mountain magic and traditions. Randolf took Wellman on trips through the Arkansas Ozarks, where Wellman absorbed folk traditions and met the isolated people of the American back country. It was through Randolf that Wellman met folk music legend Obray Ramsey, whose music would have a profound affect on Wellman and his writing.

Also in this period he worked in Wichita on The Beacon and The Wichita Eagle newspapers, and married Frances Obrist "Garfield" (her pen name), who is a horror writer in her own right; she sold her first yarn to Weird Tales magazine in 1939. During the Great Depression Wellman's newspaper work started to dwindle, so he moved to New York where he became Assistant Director of the WPA's New York Folklore Project.

In the late 1920s Wellman was writing for "Ozark Stories" and "Thrilling Tales" magazines, and then in the 1930s and 1940s the bigger publications "Weird Tales", "Wonder Stories" and "Astounding Stories". At this time "Weird Tales" published stories based on three of Wellman's most famous characters: Judge Keith Hilary Persuivant (which he wrote under the pen name Gans T. Fields), psychic detective and New York playboy John Thunstone and possibly his most famous and enduring character, John the Balladeer. He also wrote for comic books (what he called "squinkies") and wrote the first issue of "Captain Marvel Adventures" for Fawcett Publishers. Later he would be called into court to testify against Fawcett in a lawsuit by National (D.C. Comics) about plagiarism of its "Superman" character by the creators of Captain Marvel. Wellman testified that his editors had encouraged their writers to use Superman as the model for Captain Marvel. Though it took three years, National won its case.

In 1946 Wellman won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner for his Native American detective tale "A Star For A Warrior". Apparently Faulkner was quite upset playing second fiddle to a sci-fi and horror writer. He indignantly wrote to the editors of the magazine, proclaiming that he was the father of the French literary movement and the most important American writer in Europe.

After serving as a lieutenant in WW II, Wellman moved his family to Pine Bluff, North Carolina (population 300), to be closer to the folksy backwoods people he was starting to write about. There he immersed himself in American southern mountain folklore and history, becoming an expert on the Civil War and the historic regions and peoples of the Old South. Then in 1951 he made his final move to the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he lived out his days writing and teaching fiction.

Wellman built a vacation cabin on what he called Yandro Mountain in the Smokies, next to his friend Obray Ramsey's place, where they would invite friends for a taste of mountain music, food, fun and a good lick of blockade whiskey.

In 1986 Wellman took a fall from which he never recovered and he died on April 5 that year. Before passing on he finished his novel "Cahena", about an African warrior princess (possibly the inspiration for Xena?), and the John the Balladeer short story "Where Did She Wander?".