I have a long-standing interest in the life and work of the American writer and anomalist, Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932).

Fort is best known for four books - The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1932), Lo! (1931, and Wild Talents (1932). They use reported cases of anomalous phenomena to reflect on psychological and philosophical themes; they're also irreverent, funny, and fantastically written. He was the first to suggest that the unexplained lights seen in the sky might be extraterrestrial spacecraft and introduced the concept 'teleportation'. 

Read philosophically, Fort was a critic of positivist models of science and anticipated later ideas in mid-to-late C20 philosophy and sociology of science. There's also metaphysical theorising, inspired - I think - by Herbert Spencer and British Idealism, especially F.H. Bradley, as well as the fin-de-siecle 'philosophy of the organism' of A.N. Whitehead and others.

Fort is relevant to historians of science fiction - his influence echoes throughout 20th century sci-fi, many of whose writers pinched ideas from his books. Fort is also relevant for those interested in early 20th century American literature and 1920s-1930s New York literary culture (most of his contemporary admirers were important literary figures, such as the novelist Theodore Dreiser and the screenwriter Ben Hecht).

Toward the end of his life, a Fortean Society was created, later commandeered by an idiosyncratic crank, Tiffany Thayer, who also edited its journal, Doubt, which at one point was placed under FBI investigation).

My writings on Fort's life and work are:

  • A chapter on Fort's philosophy for Bob Rickard (ed.), The Books of Charles Fort, in preparation.​
  • A review of Joshua Blu Bush, Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers ​(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), for Fortean Times, in progress.
  • 'New Lands and other worlds', Fortean Times 444 (2024).
  • ‘Dogmatism be damned!’, Fortean Times 399: (2020): 54-55.
  • ‘From Dominants to the damned’, Fortean Times 388 (Jan 2020) - a special issue on the centenary of The Book of the Damned​.
  • 'Charles Fort down under', Fortean Times 374 (2018): 54-55.
  • ‘Messages from Mars and more’, Fortean Times 361 (2017): 54-55.
  • ‘Messages from Mars: More Fort letters discovered’, Fortean Times 361 (2016): 54-55.
  • 'In praise of voodoo', Fortean Times 240 (2008): 55.
  • 'Fort letter rediscovered', Fortean Times 226 (2007): 57.
  • 'Holding the Fort: How science fiction preserved the name of Charles Fort', Matrix (British Science Fiction Association) 180 (2006): 24-25.
  • 'Who was Charles Fort?', Fortean Times 216 (2006): 54-55.

I'm also compiling a resource detailing all known surviving correspondence, letters to newspapers, other writings, photographs, and other documents, plus a scholarly bibliography of essays and articles about Fort.


Biographies
Three good biographies are Damon Knight's ​Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Doubleday and Company, 1970) and Jim Steinmeyer's Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (Penguin Random House 2008). For those who can read German, there is Ulrich Magin's Der Ritt auf dem Kometen, Über Charles For (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Another excellent study is Joshua Blu Buhs' Think To New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (Chicago University Press, 2024).


Fort's fiction and non-fiction.
The Charles Fort Institute has a useful bibliography, while the best source is Resologist.net, which has copies of Fort's books, short stories, letters and Many Parts, Fort's uncompleted autobiography, covering his early life. Many of Fort's letters to newspapers are published in Chris Aubeck (ed.) Letters of the Damned: The Forgotten Investigations of Charles Fort (independently printed, 2024).

Essays
This is not a work-in-progress, not a comprehensive listing:

  • Tanner F. Boyle, The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction: Charles Fort and the Evolution of the Genre (McFarland & Company, 2020).

  • ​Joshua Blus' blog From An Oblique Angle has many excellent articles on Fort's admirers and followers. An especially excellent article is devoted to Benjamin De Casseres ('Benjamin deCasseres as a Fortean', From an Oblique Angle, 25 May 2017), a writer and close friend to Fort who remains badly understudied among Fort scholars.

  • Mike Dash, 'Charles Fort and a Man Named Dreiser', Fortean Times no. 51 (Winter 1988–1989): 40–48. Theodore Dreiser was an important early twentieth century American literary figure and a close friend and patron to Fort. His papers include our best account of Fort's lost manuscript X and an interview with Fort's wife, Anna, conducted shortly after Fort's death in 1932.

  • Miriam deFord, ‘Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science’, Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1954): 105-116. An excellent, thoughtful reflection on Fort. deFord was a science fiction author and did fieldwork for Fort.

  • Robert Barbour Johnson, 'Personalities in Science Fiction: Charles Fort: His Objects Fade in the West', If, July 1952.

  • Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (The University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  • Ulrich Magin, 'Fort as a Postmodern Writer', Fortean Times 395: 53.

  • Ulrich Magin, 'It Was One Hundred Years Ago Today: ​The Book of the Damned', Fortean Times 386: 38-43.

  • Ulrich Magin - the New Lands article, Fortean Times 2023.

  • Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover Publications (New York 1957).

  • John Mitchell, ‘Fort the Philosopher’, Fortean Times no. 177 (December 2003): 61.

  • R.J.M. Rickard, ‘A Wild Talent’, The Unexplained, vol. 8, edited by Peter Brooksmith,  (Orbis, 1980): 1721-1725.

  • R.J.M. Rickard, ‘A Wise Fool’, The Unexplained, vol. 8, edited by Peter Brooksmith,  (Orbit, 1980): 1746-1749.



  • Doug Skinner, 'Doubting Tiffany', Fortean Times, June 2005. An article on Fort's admirer Tiffany Thayer, a crank who ran the Fortean Society and edited its journal, Doubt. Thayer alienated the original members of the Fortean Society and oversaw the loss of many of Fort's papers.
​
  • Doug Skinner, 'A Fortean album from the papers of Theodore Dreiser', Fortean Times 207 44-47. An excellent collection of rare photos of Charles and Anna Fort (and her parakeets) including portraits of the pair and passport photos.

  • Charlotte Sleigh, '"An outcry of silences': Charles Hoy Fort and the Uncanny Voices of Science', Felicity Mellor and Stephen; Webster (eds.). The Silences of Science : Gaps and Pauses in the Communication of Science (London, 2017).

  • Ron Willis, 'Copyrights of Fort's Works, INFO Journal 48 (March 1986), 21.

An invaluable interest for Fortologists is resologist.net - annotated, corrected versions of Fort's books, many of his letters, ands several articles by Mr X (his legal name) himself. Mr X has also published some of Fort's correspondence, including with Dreiser.

​In the future I hope to add more material, including a listing of Fort's known letters to newspapers, reviews of his books, and other historical materials.