With a little money left by his grandfather, Fort spent two years traveling the world-at least part of it-and concluded grandiosely: The stories’ narrator sounds like Fort himself: asked to do a review, “we would not bother to go to a performance, but would just make a list of the participants and write our criticisms at home” (51). (75)įort fell behind in school then dropped out entirely, meanwhile beginning to do newspaper work and to pen some little tales set in a newspaper office. Oh, we’d just have to go away and be a hermit somewhere. Knocking a little boy’s hat off that might lead to acquaintance. Pushing another little girl into a snow pile perhaps she’d speak to us. We taking a sleigh away from a little girl, just to be acquainted. These anecdotal writings reveal a troubled child who bullied others for attention: He referred to himself as “we,” his brothers as “the Other Kid” and “the Little Kid,” and his father as “They” their housekeeper and others were given fictitious names. In his twenties, Charles Fort recorded some autobiographical “perceptions” that were “written with an odd, childish literary swagger” (19). Damon Knight was on target when he dubbed Fort “Prophet of the Unexplained.”)Ĭharles Hoy Fort (1874–1932) was born in Albany, New York, the first of three sons of a “vain” little grocer and his wife-the latter dying when Charles was four. (The paranormal includes not only all of the supernatural but such other things as extraterrestrials and Bigfoot, which-if they exist-might be entirely natural entities. Although his subtitle labels Fort The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, he is much more correct in saying (given the usual definitions of the terms involved) that “What Fort invented was our modern view of the paranormal” (Steinmeyer 2008, xv). Following his previous brilliant successes Hiding the Elephant (a history of illusionists and their secrets) and The Glorious Deception (the story of Billy Robinson who transformed himself into a famous “Chinese” magician), Steinmeyer examines the strange world of a very different type of master mystifier. Now, magic historian Jim Steinmeyer has conjured forth a stimulating-if perhaps overly sympathetic-recounting of the life of Fort.
Today’s paranormal mystery mongerers-the tireless touters of “the unexplained” who are typically merely cynical writers and broadcasters of the uninvestigated-are following in the deeply imprinted footsteps of Charles Fort. Hardcover, $24.95.Ĭharles Fort delighted in taunting “orthodox” scientists with things they seemed unable, or unwilling, to explain-for example, rains of frogs or fish (Fort 1974). Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.
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