1937-1940: 

L. Ron Hubbard’s popularity is now such that Hollywood seeks film rights to his stories and then enlists his services as a writer. After purchasing film rights to his novel, Murder at Pirate Castle, Columbia Pictures requests that he adapt this work for the screen under the title Secret of Treasure Island. Arriving in Hollywood in May 1937, Ron begins work on Secret of Treasure Island and goes to work on three other big screen serials for Columbia: The Mysterious Pilot, The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok and The Spider Returns. Ron thus works on four of Columbia’s big screen super serials. In his ten weeks in Hollywood, he not only writes over a quarter of a million words of scripts, but also continues producing for his New York editors.

Upon returning to New York, executives from Street & Smith, one of the world’s largest publishing concerns, enlist Ron’s expertise for their newly acquired magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. Ron is asked to help boost sagging sales with stories about real people – not robots, planets and spaceships. He accepts their proposal and the face of science fiction is changed forever.

His first science fiction work, The Dangerous Dimension, appears in the July 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Among other L. Ron Hubbard stories appearing in the pages of Astounding is the much acclaimed Final Blackout which is later released as a bestselling book.

In 1939 Street & Smith launch a second new magazine, Unknown, and it is soon filled with Ron’s fantasy writings which could not be accommodated in Astounding. His first story in this genre is The Ultimate Adventure, appearing in the April 1939 issue. Many more L. Ron Hubbard fiction works appear for the first time in Unknown including such legendary stories as Fear, Death’s Deputy, Typewriter in the Sky and Slaves of Sleep. These stories are subsequently released as books in their own right.

On 19 February 1940 L. Ron Hubbard is elected a member of the prestigious Explorers Club. Concurrently he plans an Alaskan expedition, and on 27 July 1940 his Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition embarks from Seattle. His vessel is the 32-foot ketch Magician, and she sails under Explorers Club flag number 105. Ron completes a voyage of some seven hundred miles, charting previously unrecorded hazards and coastlines for the US Navy Hydrographic Office. He also conducts experiments on radio directional finding, and examines local native cultures, including the Tlingit, the Haidas and the Aleutian Island natives. On 17 December 1940 the US Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation awards Ron his Master of Steam and Motor Vessels license.

In December he returns to Seattle, resuming his writing while presenting the US Navy with the hundreds of photographs and notations they had requested.