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Fort was born in Albany, New York in 1874,^[1] of Dutch ancestry. His father, a grocer, was an authoritarian and, in his unpublished autobiography Many Parts, Fort mentions the physical abuse he endured from his father. Fort's biographer, Damon Knight, suggested that his distrust of authority began in his treatment as a child. Fort developed a strong sense of independence during his early years.

As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds. Although Fort was described as curious and intelligent, he was not a good student. An autodidact, his considerable knowledge of the world was due mainly to his extensive personal reading.^{[citation needed]}

At age 18, Fort left New York to embark on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience". He travelled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until becoming ill in Southern Africa. When he returned home, he was nursed by Anna Filing, whom he had known since childhood. They were married on October 26, 1896. Anna, four years older than Fort, was non-literary, a lover of movies and of parakeets. His success as a short story writer was intermittent between periods of poverty and melancholia.^{[citation needed]}

Career as a full-time writer[edit]

His uncle died during 1916^{[citation needed]}, and a modest inheritance gave Fort enough money to quit his various day jobs and to write full-time.^[1] In 1917, Fort's brother Clarence died; his portion of the same inheritance was divided between Fort and Raymond.^{[citation needed]}

Fort's experience as a journalist,^[1] coupled with his wit and contrarian nature, prepared him for his real-life work, ridiculing the pretensions of scientific positivism and the tendency of journalists and editors of newspapers and scientific journals to rationalize.^{[citation needed]}

Fort wrote ten novels, although only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), a tenement tale, was published. Reviews were mostly positive, but it was unsuccessful commercially. During 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. Discouraged 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 published. 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 and Anna lived in London from 1924 to 1926, having relocated there so Fort could peruse the files of the British Museum.^[1] [2] Although born in Albany, Fort lived most of his life in the Bronx. He was, like his wife, fond of movies, and would often take her from their Ryer Avenue apartment to a movie theater nearby, and would stop at an adjacent newsstand for an armful of various newspapers. Fort frequented the parks near the Bronx, where he would sift through piles of his clippings. He would often ride the subway down to the main New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he would spend many hours reading scientific journals along with newspapers and periodicals from around the world. Fort also had some literary friends who would gather on occasion at various apartments, including his own, to drink and talk.^{[citation needed]}

Death[edit]