Bernard Wolfe
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Bernard Wolfe (August 28, 1915, New Haven, Connecticut – October 27, 1985, Calabasas, California) was an American writer. He was educated at Yale University, and worked in the United States Merchant Marine during the 1930s. Wolfe worked briefly as secretary and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky during the latter's exile in Mexico. During World War II he was employed as a military correspondent by a number of science magazines, and then in 1946 he began to write fiction. Wolfe was the co-writer of musician Milton Mezzrow's autobiography Really The Blues.
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Limbo
He wrote several novels, and plays, mostly for television, but is known primarily for his 1952 science-fiction novel Limbo. Because Limbo was set in the then-distant future of 1990, the original British edition is titled Limbo '90. The publisher claimed that Wolfe had written "the first book of science-fiction to project the present-day concept of 'cybernetics' to its logical conclusion". David Pringle selected Limbo for inclusion in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. Boucher and McComas, however, received the novel poorly, calling it "pretentious hodgepodge" and describing its theme as "a symbolically interesting idea . . . never developed with consistent or convincing details." P. Schuyler Miller gave Limbo a mixed review, describing it as a "colossus of a novel" while faulting its "endless talk."
Select bibliography
Nonfiction
- Really The Blues (1946)
Novels and collections
- Limbo (1952)
- The Late Risers, Their Masquerade (1954)
- In Deep (1957)
- The Great Prince Died (also published as Trotsky Dead) (1959)
- The Magic of Their Singing (1961)
- Come On Out, Daddy (1963)
- Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up (short story collection)(1968)
- Logan's Gone (1974)
- Lies (1975)
Short stories
Many of his short stories were published by Playboy Magazine, and two stories placed in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology.
- "The Never Ending Penny", originally published in Playboy Magazine, 1960
