Sounds very SI ish..............

As a young man, Fort was a budding naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds. Described as curious and intelligent, the young Fort did not excel at school, though he was considered quite a wit and full of knowledge about the world – yet this was a world he only knew through books.^{[citation needed]}

So, at the age of 18, Fort left New York on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience". He travelled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until falling ill in Southern Africa. Returning home, he was nursed by Anna Filing, a girl he had known from his childhood. They were married on October 26, 1896. Anna was four years older than Fort and was non-literary, a lover of films and of parakeets. She moved with her husband to London for two years where they would go to the cinema when Fort wasn't busy with his research. His success as a short story writer was intermittent between periods of terrible poverty and depression.^{[citation needed]}

In 1916, an inheritance from an uncle gave Fort enough money to quit his various day jobs and to write full-time. In 1917, Fort's brother Clarence died; his portion of the same inheritance was divided between Fort and Raymond.^{[citation needed]}

Fort wrote ten novels, although only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), was published. Reviews were mostly positive, but the tenement tale was commercially unsuccessful. In 1915, Fort began to write two books, titled X and Y, the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization extant at the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser, who attempted to get them published, but to no avail. Disheartened by this failure, Fort burnt the manuscripts, but was soon renewed to begin work on the book that would change the course of his life, The Book of the Damned (1919), which Dreiser helped to get into print. The title referred to "damned" data that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account and that was thus rejected or ignored.^{[citation needed]}

Fort's experience as a journalist, coupled with high wit egged on by a contrarian nature, prepared him for his real-life work, needling the pretensions of scientific positivism and the tendency of journalists and editors of newspapers and scientific journals to rationalize the scientifically incorrect.^[citati