Everett Franklin Bleiler

Background

Everett Franklin Bleiler was born on April 30, 1921, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was a son of Joseph Eugene Bleiler, a farmer, and Rose Caroline (Mayor) Bleiler.

Education

Bleiler graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in Civil Law degree in 1942. He then received his Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in 1951. He also attended the University of Leiden in 1952.

Career

Bleiler prepared the first bibliographic study in the area of fantastic fiction. Bleiler told that although his The Checklist of Fantastic Fiction was a pioneer work, it contained many errors and omitted much, it formed the basis for future study of the genre.

In later years Bleiler edited and contributed to two massive studies of fantastic fiction, Science Fiction Writers and Supernatural Fiction Writers, both of which provide biographies and critical appraisals of the leading writers in both fields, from earliest times to modern day.

More personal to Bleiler are three large volumes - The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Science-Fiction: The Early Years, and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction describes around seven thousand stories published in book form, ranging from 1750 to 1936. Bleiler told that it is the first and only book to cover the genre so thoroughly and contains a large quantity of unique material, including a full subject-matter index. Science-Fiction: The Earliest Years studies about three thousand stories in the genre. It surveys mainstream approaches, pulp fiction (except genre pulps which are covered later in Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years), dime novels, utopias, Victorian boy’s books, and anything else that is applicable. A follow-up work, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years, finishes the coverage of early science-fiction, describing close to two thousand stories from the genre magazines Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder, and spinoffs and minor magazines, from 1926 to 1936. With these three volumes, which Bleiler told that the books constitute one of the largest reading projects in literary history, early science fiction was definitively established as a field of literary study.

In addition to modern science fiction and supernatural fiction, Bleiler has also worked on earlier areas of fantastic fiction. In Three Gothic Novels, which includes Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, William Beckford’s Vathek, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Bleiler offered texts which have been used by thousands of college students. In the field known as “bloods” or early nineteenth century “penny dreadfuls,” his edition of Varney, the Vampyre, using stylometric analysis, dispelled authorial misattributions that had persisted for generations. More important, probably, was his edition for George William MacArthur Reynold’s Wagner, the Wehrwolf. In this, Bleiler not only established correctly, for the first time, Reynold’s enormous and complicated bibliography, but portrayed the journalistic, political, and literary life of a previously neglected but important Victorian political activist, writer, and editor.

Bleiler has been credited with reopening the study of Victorian supernatural fiction in more or less mainstream fiction with editions of works by J. S. LeFanu, Mrs. J. H. Riddell, and others. Bleiler told that he considers the most important of these works to include Ghost Stories and Mysteries, by J. S. LeFanu, Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell, and A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories, which reprints generally unavailable material by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others.

In the field of detective fiction, Bleiler, through his editorial work at Dover, was responsible for the first reprint program of historical classics by such authors as Ernest Bramah, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, Gaston Leroux, and others, some of which he edited with introductions. Perhaps one of the most important of these is Richmond, Chronicles of a Bow Street Runner, which reprints the first collection of detective stories. Much of this work is based on Bleiler’s unpublished Before Poe: The Prehistory of the Detective Story. 4 Treasury of Victorian Detective Stories, another work edited by Bleiler, demonstrates that many of the motifs and patterns considered modern really appeared in the middle nineteenth century.

While at Dover Bleiler prepared for publication several historical children’s books, establishing what he believes may be the first scholarly paperbound line of such books. Mother Goose’s Melodies, which Bleiler edited with a long historical introduction and bibliographic analysis, established for the first time aspects of the history of American nursery rhymes. Other volumes that Bleiler edited and introduced were Marmaduke Multiply, which traces the history of counting rhymes for children, and Mother Goose in Hieroglyphics, which examines both rebus techniques and adumbrations of ancient Egypt.

An unusual side-step in Bleiler’s work came with his preparation of Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus, under the pseudonym Liberte E. LeVert. This book established a solid text for Nostradamus’s work and provides accurate, scholarly translations and annotations and reveals Nostradamus as a minor French poet of the Renaissance. Bleiler told that modern attempts to extract supernatural messages are based on mistranslations and misinterpretations. The book received as full-page, laudatory review in the Times Literary Supplement by Dame Frances Yates, an authority on Renaissance supernaturalism. Unfortunately, Bleiler told that the rational rather than sensational nature of the book led to low sales and the author ended up giving away copies.

In addition to his work in popular culture, Bleiler has also worked with languages, which he says come easily to him. When he came to New York and took a position with Dover because he was unable obtain an academic position, Bleiler commented wryly that he was the only advertising man in New York with two and a half years of Sanskrit and two years of Chinese. “Neither language, unfortunately, was of much use in publishing”, he commented.

In his language work, which involves translations from French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Latin, and Polish, Bleiler has translated literary works, scientific works, early horticulture and botany, and miscellaneous material. Bleiler told that his venture into Polish has an odd history. Beguiled by the Chinese detective stories translated and written by Robert Van Gulik, Bleiler became interested in the form. Since, as he admits, his Chinese would not have been adequate and the texts were unobtainable, he was interested when he learned of a Polish translation of a book of Chinese stories about the magistrate Bao Gung, one of the more famous ancient detectives. Studying Polish on the train while commuting to and from work, Bleiler eventually translated the book. The long historical introduction by Polish scholar T. Zbigkowski, as translated by Bleiler, was printed in the Armchair Detective in 1978.

Bleiler has also written elementary grammars of Japanese and German. The Japanese volume has been used in Japan and in Harvard courses.

In addition to books, Bleiler wrote scores of articles that have appeared in various books, journals, and newspapers.

Achievements

• Bleiler's book Checklist of Fantastic Literature has been called "the foundation of modern Science Fiction bibliography". Bleiler received two World Fantasy Awards, in 1978 and in 1988 for lifetime achievement, and he became the first recipient who was not best known as a fiction writer. He won the President’s Award from World Science Fiction Association in 1986. Six years later he received the Locus Award for best nonfiction book. In 1994 Bleirer won the First Fandom Award. He also earned 2003 International Horror Guild Award (IHG) in the category Living Legend Award. The author won the Pilgrim Award from Science Fiction Research Association in 1984.
  
  Additionally, Bleiler was named to New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame in 1979.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Science-Fiction: The Early Years

    (Complementing Science-Fiction: The Early Years, which sur...)

    1991
  • Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years

    (Complementing Science-Fiction: The Early Years, which sur...)

    1998
  • Essential Japanese Grammar

    (The author has limited this book to modern colloquial Jap...)

    1963
  • Essential German Grammar

    (This is the first German grammar which has been specifica...)

    1961
  • The Guide to Supernatural Fiction

    (A Full Description for 1,775 Books from 1750 to 1960, Inc...)

    1983
  • The checklist of fantastic literature

    (A bibliography of fantasy, weird and science fiction book...)

    1972
  • Northwest Argentine Archeology

    (And Lowland Argentine Archeology)

    1948
  • Eight dime novels 1974
  • Five Victorian Ghost Novels 1971
  • Firegang: a Mythic Fantasy 2006
  • Magistrate Mai and the Invisible Murderer 2006

Views

Quotations: "Nostradamus was a witting charlatan and had no more predictive ability than a cow."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Bleiler’s work, the fruit of a lifetime’s reading and study of supernatural fiction, stands alone as the only reference source to provide plot summaries of thousands of short stories." - Joseph H. Cataio
  
  “With this magisterial work, the historic roots of the science-fiction field are ably delineated. Few bibliographies in any field are as readableIt is almost impossible to overstate the value of this work." - Robert S. Bravard
  
  "Science-Fiction is a gold mine of detail for researchers, and it must be appreciated both for its reliance on primary sources of information and the fact that Bleiler read and evaluated every one of the entries! ... Bleiler shines again with this latest work." - Gene LaFaille

Connections

Bleiler married Ellen Haas on May 12, 1956. The marriage produced four children - Richard, John, Constance and Dorothy.

Father:

Joseph Eugene Bleiler

Mother:

Rose Caroline (Mayor) Bleiler

child:

Richard Bleiler

His son is an American bibliographer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and adventure fiction.

child:

John Bleiler

child:

Constance Bleiler

child:

Dorothy Bleiler

Wife:

Ellen Haas

References

• A Catalogue of Crime Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres; An annotated list of more than five thousand books, including novels, short story collections, histories of the genre, true crime tales, and Sherlock Holmes studies
  1989
• New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
  1993
• Encyclopedia of Fantasy
  1997
• The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
  1986