FICTION WRITER

“My salvation is to let all this roll over me, to write, write and write some more. To hammer keys until I am finger worn to the second joint and then to hammer keys some more. To pile up copy, stack up stories, roll the wordage and generally conduct my life along the one line of success I have ever had. I write.”

And so he did. Beginning in the financially bleak 1930s, when facing a blank page posed a challenge only writers of that era can appreciate, L. Ron Hubbard very literally piled up copy, stacked up stories and rolled out the wordage. Initially, he wrote for a variety of publications, yet when readers of the day spoke of Ron, they generally spoke in terms of his novels and stories as published in those now fabled pulps.

Ron’s earliest published stories date from 1932, or his sophomore year at George Washington University, where three LRH works appear among the pages of the student quarterly. Beyond university, he set himself to a fully professional literary pursuit — in particular, supplying short stories to that legendary vehicle of popular fiction, the rough stock periodicals otherwise known as the pulps.

In the twenty-year pulp heyday between the World Wars, readership numbered in the tens of millions, and leading authors enjoyed legitimate stardom. The likes of Lester “Doc Savage” Dent, Norvell “The Spider” Page, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis L’Amour and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard, were virtually household names.

Moreover, no discussion of L. Ron Hubbard’s role in American fiction through the 1930s would be complete without considering his hand in both the reshaping of science fiction and his truly indelible stamp on fantasy. Alongside such masters as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt, he was at the vanguard of what is now commonly referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Then, decades later came the celebration of his fifty-year “marriage with the muse”, where Ron released his acclaimed 450,000 word epic, Battlefield Earth followed by the ten-volume magnum opus Mission Earth, both written during the years 1980 and 1981. With millions of fiction words in print, it is no wonder that L. Ron Hubbard continues to receive praise as “a superlative storyteller with total mastery of plot and pacing” and is recognized the world-over with such prestigious awards as the Italian Tetradramma D’Oro, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films’ Golden Scroll, France’s Cosmos 2000 and the esteemed Saturn Award from the Academy of Science Fiction.

But there was much more to Ron’s lifelong contribution to fiction. There was also the much-needed boost he provided to the struggling writer: his creation and sponsorship of the well respected Writers of the Future Contest. Launched in 1983 as an unparalleled forum to aid the careers of the unpublished novelist, the Writer’s of the Future Contest has been a springboard for the publication of some 150 previously unknown young authors, placing more than 100 new novels on American shelves.

“The artist injects the spirit of life into a culture,” Ron wrote at the inauguration of his Writers of the Future program, and if expressly referencing tomorrow’s authors, those sentiments certainly apply to himself.

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