charles fort
© CC by SA 3.0Charles Fort, 1920, a depiction of a UFO, and an okapi at Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom, symbol of the defunct International Society of Cryptozoology.
Charles Hoy Fort was an American "self-educated newspaperman, modestly-successful short story writer, unsuccessful novelist and inventor, and eccentric natural philosopher," regarded by some, especially his devotees, who call themselves 'Forteans', as a pioneer of anomalistic.

This is a term coined in 1973 by an anthropologist by the name of Roger W. Wescott, and has been used to describe the "interdisciplinary study of scientific anomalies (alleged extraordinary events unexplained by currently accepted scientific theory)". Fort was fascinated by such anomalies, and spent much of his adult life collecting accounts of such events.

Charles' Troubled Early Life

Charles Fort was born on August 6, 1874 in Albany, New York. Fort's parents were Dutch immigrants who became fairly prosperous in the United States. Fort's family owned a wholesale grocery business in Albany. Fort had a painful childhood, as it has been said that his father was abusive and often beat him. Some believe that as a result of these experiences, Fort became skeptical and distrustful of authority and dogma.

In 1892, at the age of 18, Fort escaped his father's authoritarian ways by leaving home. He began working as a journalist for a New York newspaper and eventually became an editor of a Long Island paper. He quit his job, however, in 1893, and hitchhiked around the world.

His travels were cut short in 1896 when he contracted malaria in South Africa. After that, Fort returned to New York, and married Anna Filing. One source claims that Anna was "an Irish immigrant whom he had known in Albany", whilst another says she was "an English servant girl in his father's house".

Fort's Writings

For the next couple of years, Fort lived in the Bronx with his wife. During this time, the couple lived in poverty, and Fort tried to make ends meet by writing stories for newspapers and magazines. Fort eventually gave up on writing fiction. In 1906, he began to collect accounts of anomalies. However, this was not his initial aim. Instead, whilst doing his research in the New York Public Library, he read about a whole range of subjects, including science, art, philosophy, and economics. It was here that he found reports of odd things, and started to collect them by scribbling them on small sheets of paper.

In 1915, Fort had finished writing two books, X and Y. Unfortunately, publishers during that time were not interested in them, and hence they were considered failures. These books were later lost, as Fort destroyed both manuscripts later in his career.

In the same year, Fort was encouraged by Theodore Dreisner (a magazine editor whom Fort met in 1905 and befriended) to compile his reports of anomalies into a book. In the following year, Fort received a modest inheritance from an uncle which allowed him to concentrate on his writing. Thus, in 1919, the Book of the Damned was published.

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