Carl Rathjen

Background

Carl Rathjen was born on August 28, 1909 in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States.

Education

Rathjen received his Bachelor of Computer Science degree in 1931 from New York University.

Career

Carl Rathjen worked at a variety of jobs during the Depression, including copywriter for an advertising agency, laborer, counselor at a boy’s camp, and during World War II as a cutter in a Los Angeles-based rubber company. He also taught creative writing at Treasure Valley Community College and was a periodic guest lecturer at Northwest Nazarene College.

Carl was a full-time writer from 1932 on, mostly of fiction for the juvenile market. His first book was Smoke-Eater (1954). Rathjen wrote fifteen books, including one gothic, Dark Music under the pseudonym Charlotte Russell (1972), and two tie-ins for the popular The Waltons TV series. He contributed numerous stories to at least thirty anthologies for the teen-age market, as well as to many juvenile and genre-related magazines and periodicals, including Argosy, Boys’ Life, Saturday Evening Post, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, American Girl, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and the New York Daily News. He was executive secretary and editor of the Osteopathic Cranial Academy Newsletter, the Sutherland Cranial Teaching Foundation, and the trustee-treasurer of the Meridian Free Library District.

Achievements

Carl received a Boys’ Life—Dodd, Mead Honorable Mention Writing Award for Smoke-Eater, a "twenty best stories" nomination from Saturday Evening Post for "Runaway Rig", a Rotary International Award for his conspicuous service to youth, the Idaho Governor’s Promoter of the Week Award, the Idaho Writer of the Year Award, and prose awards from the Boise chapter of the Idaho Writers League.