these things) and could look ahead to the next several months as I researched Clare’s life, I would have seen that I would soon reveal, in this introduction, an important unpublished story of hers and a whole chapter of her life that had never been written about, among other things.
But that is yet to come.
Claire Marie Winger was born on January 18, 1891, in the county seat of Freeport, Illinois, to Mary Porter ‘May’ Stover and Frank Stover Winger, an electrical engineer. Frank was related to Mary; he was a Stover on his mother’s side. Clare had a brother, Stover Carl Winger, born 1893, who was named after their mother’s wealthy father, Daniel Carl “D. C.” Stover, founder of the Stover Engine Works. After their children were born and raised, Clare’s parents divorced.
In 1910, Clare graduated from Chicago’s Lake View High School and went to Smith College with a bright future ahead of her. While at school, Clare met Frank Clyde Harris, a veteran of World War I who worked as an engineer designing heavy armor plating. He might have seemed very familiar to her. Clare dropped out and they married in 1912 in Chicago. The newlyweds traveled to Europe before relocating cross-country as Frank finished his Master’s in architectural engineering. During these years, Clare had three sons: Clyde Winger (1915), Donald Stover (1916), and Lynn Thackrey (1918).
In 1917, Clare’s father published a novel with the fantastical title of The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger. How did an electrical engineer become drawn to science fiction? He most certainly read the best trade magazine on the subject, The Electrical Experimenter, which later became Science and Invention. In addition to publishing circuit diagrams, editor Hugo Gernsback pontificated on all kinds of bizarre, theoretical inventions like the “thought telegrapher” and “television.” He also advocated for a new type of literary genre called “Scientifiction” that used scientific fact as the basis for imaginative stories.
In 1923, Clare wrote her first and only published novel, the classically-themed Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece through the Boston-based Stratford Company. Three years later, Weird Tales Magazine published her story “A Runaway World” in its July issue. Attributed to “Mrs. F. C. Harris,” it is the first American science-fiction story by a woman using her own name.
The realm that Clare was publishing in was a decidedly strange one. Though writers had been publishing weird science stories since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, it wasn’t until the advent of the pulp magazines that the genre became popular. The pulps, with names like Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, were aimed at the youngish reader with their fully painted covers, spot illustrations, and dense stories printed on cheap paper. They had letter columns where readers could offer critique and exchange letters in a kind of early typeset Internet. Many of these early letter writers rose up into significant and lucrative roles as writers, editors, and publishers. Science fiction was embraced, and then run, by its first-contact fans.
In June 1927, while Clare was living in Lakewood, Amazing Stories ran a writing contest cooked up by Gernsback, who had now fully embraced science fiction publishing. Clare entered, along with three hundred and fifty-eight other people, with her environmental space opera “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” in which Earth’s water supply is stolen by opportunistic Martians. Clare won third place for her story (with a female lead) and signed it “Clare Winger Harris.”
In announcing the winners, Gernsback, whose earlier editorials probably influenced Clare’s father, gave praise couched in the cultural moment:
That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientification writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.
The prize opened doors for Clare. She published extensively in the pulps for the next three years, especially for Gernsback. These stories, reprinted in this volume, run the gamut of quaint, thrilling, and terrifying. I will not spoil your experience by summarizing them here. Read them. You are so close. Trust me.
Her story “The Ape Cycle” in the May 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly is generally considered her last. It might also be a largely unacknowledged source for a popular media franchise, but I will let you judge that for yourself. Then suddenly, at age thirty-nine, Clare stopped. Someone even wrote into Amazing Stories in late 1930 and asked, “What happened to Clare Winger Harris? I’ve missed her …” Every single account of her life says that she quit to focus on raising her children.
When Clare quit, her popularity was so great that her name was regularly being used on covers as advertising. She could have, like her peers, gone on to write novels, comic books, or even for the screen. But she walked away. Or did she?
In the early thirties, after “The Ape Cycle,” a fan of Clare’s from the east side of Cleveland wrote her a fan letter. He gushed about her work. He said that he was working on his own magazine with his best friend and would like her to submit to it. He was in high school.
Clare might have smiled at this request, which might be why she sent a story. It appeared in 1933 in the fifth and last issue of a stapled, mimeographed pamphlet called Science Fiction that had a print run of maybe—maybe—fifty issues. The boy who wrote her was Jerry Siegel and his friend was Joe Shuster. In a couple of years, they would go on to create Superman, the most recognized science fiction character on the planet.
I am very pleased that we have that story, titled “The Vibrometer,” collected here for the first time since that small self-published magazine. Special thanks to comics scholar Dr. Thomas Andrae for his generous gift of this time-lost story. Its existence shows how influential Clare was to the next generation of science fiction writers, even those creating the perfect fictional hero. She was often a teacher. One of her most enduring legacies, also reprinted here, is a letter she wrote for the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories. In it, she lists possible science fiction plots for writers like Jerry Siegel and others, including “Interplanetary space travel,” “Adventures on other worlds,” and “The creation of synthetic life.” Hopeful writers tore this out and followed it. You can still follow them today. I have endeavored to follow them here.
Clare and Frank eventually divorced, and Clare moved out west. In an April 10, 1960, interview with the Plain Dealer’s Jane Scott, Frank Harris looks back on his life in Cleveland, where he stayed after the divorce. His monorail company was integral to the war effort and he was now—in 1960—worth six million dollars. Frank, still a workaholic, doesn’t mention Clare. He says his hobbies are collecting oriental art with his new wife, whom he met on a golf course. He is also proud of his children: Clyde develops missile systems, Don is an engineer in Indiana, and Lynn is a research writer for the government in California. Some later accounts of Clare’s life claim that Frank, as the fully realized technological man of the future, was an inspiration for her own work.
Though Clare disappeared from the writing life, her stories were reprinted with great regularity in other sci-fi mags, though with similar biographical blurbs. In 1947, she self-published a collection of her short stories titled Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science from Dorrance Press without any introduction. Other reprints and inclusions by fans and scholars followed, from Richard A. Lupoff and Lisa Yaszek, among others. She was recently included in a 2018 summertime exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of History celebrating science fiction authors in the area.
Every single published account of Clare Winger Harris ends that she stopped writing, raised her family, and died in 1968. Some go so far as to say she had no living relatives.
She left only her stories behind.
But
