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Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural

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At last a major biography worthy of the man who introduced us to the truly amazing and inexplicable world we inhabit. Not since Damon Knight's 1970 bio has Fort been given his due. Fort came from an odd childhood of upper class indulgence and Dickensian cruelty perpetuated by his father. Fort's personal individuation was one of rebellion against social norms and mindless restrictions leading him to an "on the road" existence of travel, train yards, and down and outs from the backroads of America to cattle ships to Britain.

Fort was Bohemia's bohemian who struggled as a newspaper reporter, starving novelist and hermit in a domestic life surrounded by his devoted wife and research notes. Theodore Drieser was the champion that finally realized the unique genius possessed by Fort and supported him with unwaivering friendship through the remainder of Fort's short but prolific life.

But did he "invent" the supernatural as alleged by the title? Like an eccentric Zen master, Fort directly pointed at the documented realities that intrude into a well ordered empirical universe with distinctly uncomfortable implications. Continuing with the zen metaphor, Fort's "stick that heals" was one of curiosity and doubt. He had possessed a healthy minded agnosticism that was interested in everything because everything is interesting. Rather than "invent" Fort more accurately precipitated what has become known as the supernatural. Among the phenomena he documented were aerial phenonmena later to be called UFO's, vanishing lands, people, vessels and mysterious falls of substances that should not fall upon us are now pillars of the supernatural that continue to baffle and delight.

Fort was a pioneer of an art and/or science that provided us with a lens to view the curious and wonderful world around us in ways not dreamed of in our philosophy. Mr. Steinmeyer, an established writer of magical wonders, is to be thanked for this work that brings the enigmatic Charles Fort to a new generation of readers and potential forteans. Highly recommended.

Magician and magical historian Jim Steinmeyer has written a carefully "agnostic" biography of that infamous agnostic of pseudoscience, Charles Hoy Fort. By this I mean that Steinmeyer essentially never intrudes with summations, analyses, judgments or conclusions... he gives the facts and lets them speak for themselves. In dealing with Fort, this is probably the correct approach.

Fort was the product of a horrific childhood that would leave almost anyone seriously mentally ill, and indeed as an adult he found no part of society into which he could fit. Dropping out of high school (failing math and science, naturally) he worked as a newspaper reporter, and then tried to make a living as a writer of magazine fiction. His work during this period usually consisted of slice-of-life accounts (including one published novel) of daily existence in the slums and tenements of New York.

At some point he turned to the writing of conventionally crazy pseudoscience, in the now-lost manuscripts he called X and Y. In X he argued that all life on earth is designed, evolved and controlled by intelligent creatures living on Mars. In Y he argued that there is a super-race living in a huge depression at the North Pole. In both works he used the technique familiar from Ignatius Donnelly (and later Immanuel Velikovsky), namely the backing of these wild claims by overwhelming (yet actually irrelevant) numbers of citations from obscure records and documents. Either manuscript could easily have been configured as science fiction, but despite hints from his good friend, novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort refused to make the conversions. Neither was ever published in any form.

Instead, an inheritance gave him leisure to write the four pseudoscience works for which he is best known, beginning with THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. (He also appears to have written at least two other books in this vein, which he later destroyed, "M and F" and "WW".) The four published works follow the pattern of X and Y in consisting mainly of summaries of accounts of supposedly amazing phenomena, drawn from old magazines and newspapers, but differ in championing no particular scenario or hobbyhorse. They are well-written, in a somewhat annoyingly "cute" style, and often quite deliberately funny.

Fort really started something, but it's difficult to say precisely just what. Most pseudoscience books of the 20th Century have had a superficially Fortean structure, but actually they jump back to Donnelly, using the structure to support just one particular crazy scenario.

Fort is an important figure in the history of early 20th Century pure-quill craziness, and this carefully-researched biography is very welcome.

If you have a taste for giant lights in the sky or in the ocean, flying ships "shaped like a Mexican cigar", or secret polar civilizations; or especially, if you want to know more about how rain could come down colored red, black, or yellow, or could include a storm of eels or pebbles or frogs, then Charles Fort is your man. And if you want explanations, you might find it satisfactory that Fort instructs about the blood that dripped from the sky, "... our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages. - Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans..." Fort gets high points for curiosity, and no points for explication, but ninety years after his strange ideas were first put in print, his name is still known by students of the paranormal, whether the name be reviled or praised. In _Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural_ (Tarcher / Penguin), Jim Steinmeyer has given a jolly story of this remarkably strange man. Steinmeyer has written about various aspects of the history of magic, and he designs magic illusions for famous magicians, but this is an appreciative, no-nonsense biography, quite anomalously fitting for a subject who surrounded himself with at least some nonsensical tales taken as fact.

Fort was born in 1874, and grew up in Albany, N.Y. His father was a grocer, a dandy, and a bully, and following a terrible row at home when he was eighteen, Fort left home for good to see the world. When he returned, he started writing stories for magazines, often in the popular vein of O. Henry. He had some success, got some stories published, but the pay was small. He was saved artistically by none other than the author of _An American Tragedy_, Theodore Dreiser, who became his best friend. It is strange that the dour Dreiser, famous for naturalistic and pessimistic fiction, should have admired Fort's stories, but when Fort began working on his strange metaphysics, Dreiser gave his estimation of Fort's genius as "simply stupendous", and he coached, corrected, and ushered Fort's work into print. Fort loved going to the library and researching, and he collected on scraps of paper any oddity that struck his fancy, phenomena that he designated beyond the explanatory power of science. Steinmeyer shows that Fort's speculations fit into the fizzy 1920s, and his book sold well. Fort insisted that "... nothing ever has been proved. Because there is nothing to prove." With everything all connected, the distinctions which science made were arbitrary and pointless. The _New York Tribune_ titled its laudatory review of the book "Science Mocked". Steinmeyer concedes that at a time when Gugliemo Marconi and Percival Lowell were telling the public about the endeavors of the Martians, Fort may have had a point. Generally, however, he had little real knowledge of how science worked, and his dismissal of science overall was fatuous. He was more appropriately skeptical of spiritualism, and he refused to be drawn on biblical miracles, because he drew the line at anything happening before 1800. He despised conspiracy theorists.

Fort was shy, and despite his confident prose and extraordinary speculations, he did not enjoy being with others much. Even Dreiser only met with him a score of times. He liked going to the movies. He devised a game called Super-checkers and was pleased with it; it had 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares. He had to play himself in solitaire, because no one else took it up. He hated using the telephone, and he hated dealing with doctors, thus hastening his own death in 1932, at age 57. By that time, he had published three other books along the lines of _The Book of the Damned_. He had a following, although his shyness kept him from enjoying it. There is a British periodical _Fortean Times_ that publishes Fort's style of oddities, but perhaps does not pay attention to the witticisms with which Fort wrote them up; it seems impossible to tell exactly what Fort took seriously and what he didn't. Steinmeyer's entertaining biography gives plenty of details on the enigmatic life of an oddball misfit. There are scientists and literary figures that occasionally hobnobbed with Fort, and many who wrote about him (some in praise), so he was an influential figure. He is thought by skeptics to be credulous and naïve, but his writing is full of contradictions and paradoxes. It is tough to give a portrait of a man who could write, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not," or "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written," but Steinmeyer has nicely placed Fort within his times and charted his effects on the years thereafter.

Steinmeyer does a good job of encapsulating the life of Fort, who must not have been the easiest person to research. While a little short on Fort's actual motivation to catalog the world's oddest phenomena, the book provides fascinating accounts of Fort's troubled childhood, adult poverty, note-taking methodology and his strange and lengthy friendship with fellow author Theodore Dreiser. The subtitle "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" is misleading, but I suspect it may not have been Steinmeyer's idea. It's a fast and curious look into the life of one our grand eccentrics.

How does one really write a biography on Charles Fort? Eccentric, perhaps psychotic, certainly depressed, and someone who wants an explanation and can't get one.

Steinmeyer places a lot of effort into the work, but Fort's real story was likely hidden in one of the note sets he burned.

And, I wouldn't exactly agree with the subtitle caption- the Supernatural wasn't invented by any specific person, no more than Al Gore invented the Internet.

While not intending any malign against author Steinmeyer; perhaps the best biography of Fort would be to read his "DAMNED" works, and draw your own conclusions. Some things he wrote about (both authors) were seemingly deeply logical, while in the case with others, preposterous, at best.

Charles Fort is one of those peripheral figures you'll encounter if you venture into the territory of mysteries and the unexplained.

Except for Tiffany Thayer's brief introduction to Fort's "Book of the Damned," little biographical material has been available on the man. Jim Steinmeyer, a historian of stage magic and illusion, has attempted to fill that void with this biography.

He provides background on Fort's abusive childhood, his rebellious escape into journalism and restless wanderings here and abroad and his subsequent career as writer and challenger of orthodoxy. Much on his early life is quoted from Fort's unpublished memoir, "Many Parts," written in an odd first-person plural. Steinmeyer also utilizes extensive comments from Fort's contemporaries, especially Theodore Dreiser, who considered him a genius, but also from critics like H.L. Mencken and H.G. Wells, who considered him a crank.

Steinmeyer never resolves the question of whether Fort was a genius or a crank. But he provides ample ammunition for the reader to utilize in forming an opinion.

I am probably the only reader of this biography who has never read a book by Charles Fort. I became interested because he is very, very distantly related. I came across Charles Hoy Fort while studying my family's genealogy.

Steinmeyer does a tremendous job of detailing the troubled Fort family life. It was the most fascinating part of the book for me. I wish that more of Charles' memoir had survived; perhaps it was too painful for him. The pictures he collected for publication were a good complement to the book.

I can fill in some additional family relationships. Charles father, Charles Nelson Fort, was the son of Peter Van Vrancken Fort and Elizabeth Neilson. Peter and Elizabeth also had a daughter Lizzie. Elizabeth passed away before 1865; Peter V. Fort remarried to Catherine Farrell. Peter and Catherine had three sons - Frederick, William, and Frank. Hence, Frank, who was listed in the book in relation to the will of Peter V. Fort, was a half brother to Charles Nelson Fort. Steinmeyer mentioned an aunt of Charles Hoy Fort who told his widow Anna she had no right to Charles' money. The aunt was unnamed, but I wonder if she was either Lizzie or one of the widows of William or Frank Fort.

Elizabeth (Neilson) Fort was the daughter of Charles Neilson (aka Nelson), who wrote a book on Burgoyne's campaign, based on the recollections of his father John Neilson, who was a scout at the battle of Saratoga. This book is still in print today. Hence, Charles Fort's g-grandfather was also a writer, although in a considerably different genre from Charles. I was intrigued by the title of Fort's book, "The Outcast Manufacturers." Many of the Neilson descendants, who would have been cousins of Charles Nelson Fort, were "manufacturers" in the late 1800s, owning knitting mills in Saratoga and Montgomery county, New York.

Although I'm unfamiliar with Fort's writings, Steinmeyer intrigued me enough with his description of Fort's writing process and impact that I do plan to delve into Fort's books.

Yes, the old adage about not judging a book by its cover applies here. Sad, but true, the cover of this book as designed by one Jason Smith is BRILLIANT. It is evocative, mysterious, profound, eye and mind catching.....everything which the actual book by Jim Steinmeyer is NOT. Mr. Steinmeyer - so the dust-jacket bio-brief informs - designs magic illusions for TV, film, David Copperfield, etc. Too bad he could not have waved a wand over his book on Charles Fort and made it....magical!

One fault is that probably more than half the book consists of quotations from Fort's books, letters to and from friend and fellow writer Theodore Dreiser and other sources. Another fault is a certain inbalance: the book begins leisurely and lengthily goes into Fort's boyhood and young manhood...but there is really no insight as to when the struggling writer entered the Twilight Zone and got weird. And once in the Zone and reporting via his curious tomes about the goings-on therein, there is no considerate attempt by Steinmeyer to come to grips with any of the phenomena described by way of theoretical explanation. Beautifully embossed on the book's hardcover is a frog falling from the sky - one of Fort's motifs. Yet there is no true attempt at explaining such a mystifying event. I realize that this is a biography of Charles Fort and not an investigation into the strange happenings he built his career on - but, come on....would a bit of investigative explanation have hurt? Even if in appendixes or footnotes?

The book's jacket boasts that "Steinmeyer tells the story of an era in which the certainties of religion and science were being turned on their heads." He does? Einstein and the Scopes trial are mentioned in a weak and wobbly way. He mentions Al Capone a few times - utterly gratuitously, probably to fill up some space - but no real effort is given to encompassing the science and religion of the era. As to the book's subtitle - "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" - it is totally untrue and misleading and ignores at the very least the fully documented supernatural investigations of several organizations and individuals in the prior century and in the years leading up to Fort's writings. For example: rather contemporaneously with Fort, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was showing Willis O'Brien's film of "The Lost World" to respected scientists who thought they were seeing actual footage of living dinosaurs - and the great creator of Sherlock Holmes was also chasing faked fairies in highly contested photographs of the day.

Anyway - I learned more about Charles Fort and also the phenomena he wrote about by googling him and reading all the rich info for free on Wikipedia. I found their take on Fort and Fortean phenomena to be much more informative that the whole of this book. So - great cover, not-great book.

Interesting bio of Charles Fort, though it focuses much more on his private life and struggles than his work. Readers looking for a taste of Forteana won't find much of it here, but there is a great deal of info on Fort's short stories and literary career. I picked this up because I LOVED Steinmeyer's book Hiding the Elephant and wanted to read something else of his. This is a different sort of book, but still engaging. Looking forward to his forthcoming bio of Thurston.

Two quibbles: JS drops the ball a couple of times when examining Fort's interfaces with the evolution battle of the early 20th century. Twice he locates the Scopes monkey trial in Dayton, Ohio, when in fact it took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That's kind of a biggie.

He also gives the partial story on Fort's summary of Darwinism, which is hilarious: "The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest, not the cleverest-- Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive."

Steinmeyer is then quick to note that the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, not by Darwin, noting "Darwin was cleverer than this." BUT -- in the 5th edition (1869) of "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life," while discussing natural selection, Darwin noted: "But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient." (page 79)

I've noticed that the fruits of my researches appear in books curiously devoid of my name. In the late 1990's and early years of this century, I made the mistake of posting articles on the Internet about Fort, and other unusual topics, and finding the content stripped of my name--not even a thank-you--and appearing under the "researches" of others.

Case in point: this book, published in 2008.

In 2000 I posted an article called "How Do We Pigeonhole that, Mr. Fort" at the website "Farshores" ([...]) in which I presented the excerpt from "Queer Books" that appears on page 191 of this volume, and which is "foot-noted" on pg 315, without so much as a thank you. How do I know that this "gentleman" did not stumble across the account himself? Because he follows my advice in the original article as it appears at Farshores, and later, on 17, March, 2004 on the Fortean Times message board, with annotations by "byroncac," who further helped the author of this book by providing from his own knowledge of Fort's life, including the letter to Dreiser. (See [...])

This author even paraphrases my annotations in the original article and takes my advice to consider Pearson the self-same librarian of which he writes.

I have stopped posting my research on the net because the information develops long legs and leaves my name, and--incidentally-- my copyright--behind. Fort cited his sources correctly and I'm certain he would be just as livid over this as I am.