Charles Fort

Writer

Charles Hoy Fort was a writer who spent his time at the library, taking notes from scientific journals and formulating a response to what he considered their suppression of anomalous data. Helped along by American writer Theodore Dreiser, Fort published The Book of the Damned in 1919, a collection of weird stories he had come across in his research, followed by New Lands (1923) and Lo! (1931). "Fortean" organizations sprang up after Fort's death, furthering a tradition of distributing stories of the bizarre as a jab in the ribs of the scientific community. Some consider Fort the father of paranormal studies, some consider him simply an avid collector of weird tales.