Background

Richard Sharpe Shaver was born on October 8, 1907, in Berwick, Pennsylvania, United States to the family of Ziba Rice Shaver and Grace Taylor.

Education

There is no information on Richard Sharpe Shaver's education and what kind of training he had come through to be able to create his works.

Career

Little is reliably known about Richard Sharpe Shaver’s early life. According to Shaver, in 1932, while working on an assembly line at a factory, he developed telepathic abilities that gave him insight into “malign entities in caverns deep within the earth.” According to author Michael Barkun, Shaver gave inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but the assembly line story was the “most common version.” Shaver said he then quit his job and became a hobo for a period. In 1934, according to Barkun, “Shaver was hospitalized briefly for psychiatric problems but there does not appear to have been a clear diagnosis.”

In 1943, Shaver wrote to the editors of Amazing Stories, claiming to have discovered an ancient Proto-World language he called Mantong. When one editor threw away Shaver’s letter, Ray Palmer retrieved it and contacted Shaver. Shaver claimed that in Mantong, which was the source of all earthly language, each sound had a hidden meaning, and, by applying a formula to any word in any language, one could decode a secret meaning from any word, name, or phrase.

Over the course of their correspondence, Shaver described a race of aliens who had populated caves within the Earth before fleeing the planet, though not without leaving behind two groups of offspring - one, the “Teros,” a benevolent humanoid group, and the other, “Deros,” or “detrimental robots,” a sadistic group that tortured and ate humans. Women, especially, were treated brutally by the Deros. (Shaver claimed to have been held prisoner by the Deros for several years, though Palmer later stated that, in fact, Shaver had been in a mental institution.) These alien races were explained in detail in a 10,000-word document titled “A Warning to Future Man,” which Palmer edited and rewrote, cutting much of the sadomasochistic content toward women, though he claimed that he remained true to Shaver’s vision. Palmer re-titled the now 31,000-word manuscript “I Remember Lemuria!” and published it in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.

The issue sold out. Palmer claimed to have received thousands of letters in response from people who claimed to have experienced similar things. According to Barkun, the circulation of the magazine increased from about 135,000 to 185,000. “Shaver Mystery Club” societies were created in several cities. The controversy gained some notice in the mainstream press at the time, including a mention in a 1951 issue of Life magazine.

For the next few years, much of the content of Amazing Stories was related to the Shaver Mystery, though many science fiction fans disapproved, even organizing letter-writing campaigns in protest. Palmer printed a number of critical or skeptical letters sent to him, and he and other contributors occasionally rebutted or replied to such letters in print. Bruce Lanier Wright notes, “The young Harlan Ellison, later a famously abrasive writer, allegedly badgered [Palmer] into admitting that the Shaver Mystery was a ‘publicity grabber’; when the story came out, Palmer angrily responded that this was hardly the same thing as calling it a hoax.” Critics of the “Shaver Mystery” were quick to point out that its author was suffering from several of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

In 1948, Amazing Stories discontinued publishing Shaver’s stories due to decreased sales. Palmer continued publishing Shaver’s work in The Hidden World, and Shaver and his wife produced the Shaver Mystery Magazine irregularly for some years.

Shaver moved to Summit, Arkansas, in the mid-1960s with his wife, Dottie. During the 1960s and 1970s, now living in obscurity, Shaver claimed to have discovered physical evidence of the aliens in certain “rock books” embedded with pictures and texts. He wrote about, photographed, and made paintings of the images he found in these “rock books” for years, going so far as to create a lending library through the mail, sending to the borrower a slice of polished agate with a detailed description of what writings, drawings, and photographs were archived inside the stone.

Achievements

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  Richard Sharpe Shaver's stories, in which he claimed to have discovered an ancient, sinister civilization in underground caves, led to Shaver Mystery Clubs and influenced many artists and writers, including Harlan Ellison and Phillip K. Dick.
  
  Shaver never succeeded in generating much attention for his later findings, but, in the years since his death in 1975, there have been exhibits of Shaver’s art and photographs at the California Institute of the Arts, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Gallery of Chapman University in Orange County, California. Shaver’s art has also been exhibited in art galleries in New York City and in a traveling exhibition of “outsider photography” called “Create and Be Recognized” that originated at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, in 2004.

Works

More photos

• book

  • We Dance for the Dom!

    (The Dom had a triple crown, and it was by a strange circu...)

    1950
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book Six

    (Armchair fiction presents extra large paperback editions ...)

    2015
  • Gods of Venus and other Stories

    (Classical Science Fiction awaits the reader with three st...)

    1948
  • The Return of Sathanas

    (This trip was ordered by the great Elders of Nor themselv...)

    1946
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book Five

    (It’s another collection of the far-out tales of Richard S...)

    2014
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book Three

    (The Shaver Mystery, Book Three” by Richard S. Shaver is a...)

    2012
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book Four

    (“The Shaver Mystery, Book Four” by Richard S. Shaver. Wel...)

    2013
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book One

    ("The Shaver Mystery," by Richard S. Shaver, is perhaps th...)

    2011
  • The Shaver Mystery: Book Two

    (“The Shaver Mystery,” by Richard S. Shaver, is one of the...)

    2011
  • Of Stegner's Folly 1952
  • Daughter of the Night 1948
  • I Remember Lemuria 1945
  • Cult of the Witch Queen 1946
  • The Sea People/Witch's Daughter 1946

• publication

  • Other Worlds Science Stories: October 1951

    (Digest-sized pulp magazine containing short stories of sc...)

    1951
  • Fantastic Adventures: June 1949 1949
  • Other Worlds Science Stories: October 1952 1952
  • Amazing Stories: March 1948 1948
  • Fantastic Adventures: Quarterly, Fall 1949 1949
  • Other Worlds: December 1952 1952
  • Mystic Magazine, Issue No. 13 1956
  • Amazing Stories: October 1957 1957
  • Mystic Magazine, Issue No. 8 1955
  • Fantastic Adventures: July 1948 1948
  • Fantastic Adventures: December 1948 1948
  • Other Worlds: February 1953 1953
  • The Hidden World: Winter 1962 1962
  • Other Worlds Science Stories: August 1952 1952
  • The Hidden World: Summer 1964 1964
  • Amazing Stories: May 1947 1947

Views

Richard Sharpe Shaver manifested his views in his works. The development of his world outlook through his publications marked the progress in his psychosis.

Membership

"Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution." - Raymond A. Palmer, Shaver's editor and publisher

Personality

Literary critics of the 'Shaver Mystery' pointed out that its author was suffering from several of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Richard Sharpe Shaver's publisher Ray Palmer revealed in 1975 that he indeed had been treated for this decrease in a mental hospital.

Connections

Richard Sharpe Shaver married an art teacher and artist Sophie Gurvitch with whom he had a daughter Evelyn Ann Shaver. After the death of his first wife, he married Dorothy Erb.

Father:

Ziba Rice Shaver

Mother:

Grace Taylor

late wife:

Sophie Gurvitch

Daughter:

Evelyn Ann Shaver

Wife:

Dorothy Erb

publisher:

Raymond Arthur Palmer

References

• Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver - Volume 1 Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver presents the paintings, photographs, and essays that made up Richard Shaver's ante-diluvian cosmology.
  2014
• Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver - Volume 2 The second part of the Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver.
  2014
• Shaverology: A Shaver Mystery Home Companion Some of the questions you may find answered in Shaverology: Was Ray Palmer a hoaxer extraordinaire as his critics claim, or was he a believer beyond all reason? Who really discovered the Shaver Mystery?
  2013
• This Tragic Earth: The Art and World of Richard Sharpe Shaver This Tragic Earth gives a unique, long-overdue look into the art and mind of Richard S. Shaver.
  2014
• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998