Leigh Brackett

1915–1978

1 series 1 book in order

Leigh Brackett was an American novelist and screenwriter who was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised near Santa Monica. As a young person, she was an athletic tom-boy who enjoyed playing volleyball and reading the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. She began writing her own fantastic adventures and had her first published science fiction story, "Martian Quest," featured in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, was a hard-boiled mystery novel published in 1944. This novel led to her being asked by Hollywood director Howard Hawks to help William Faulkner write the script for the film The Big Sleep in 1946. In the same year, she married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton. After the release of The Big Sleep, she returned to writing science fiction, producing several novels and short stories. In 1955, as pulp magazines declined and the market for short science fiction stories cooled, she began working more in film and television, though she continued to write science fiction, including The Long Tomorrow. She returned to fiction writing in the 1970s, producing The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith, which were collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976. She lived from 1915 to 1978.

Born

1915

Known for

Mars trilogy