Education
He studied at Yale for a period, but then transferred to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1903.
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Elmer Mason
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Mason became an entomologist for the now-defunct Bureau of Entomology (United States Department of Agriculture) in 1910. In addition, he was a seasoned world traveler. In 1915, his fantastic stories of scientists hunting rare species in the remote corners of the world started appearing.
Of note were the five stories featuring swamp-guide, Wandering Smith, in The Popular Magazine, especially "The Golden Anaconda".
And the variety of tales in All-Story Weekly, highlighted by the horror-filled lost-race novelette "Black Butterflies," set in Borneo, and its sequel, "Red Tree-Frogs."
Mason was gassed in France during World War I, suffering permanent disabilities, which sidetracked his writing career. His globe-trotting ceased and his stories exchanged the fantastic for the domestic.
His fiction writing career petered out around 1926. He had a brief revival in 1949-1950 in the pulp magazines, Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels, which reprinted four of his stories from All-Story Weekly.
"Black Butterflies," was included in the anthology Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder educated by Forrest J. Ackerman.
Anne Hardin.
