32 Facts About Charles Fort

Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena.

Charles Fort's work continues to inspire admirers, who refer to themselves as "Forteans", and has influenced some aspects of science fiction.

Charles Fort was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, of Dutch ancestry.

Charles Fort's father, a grocer, was an authoritarian, and in his unpublished autobiography Many Parts, Fort mentions the physical abuse he endured from his father.

Charles Fort developed a strong sense of independence during his early years.

At age 18, Charles Fort left New York to embark on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience".

Charles Fort travelled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until becoming ill in Southern Africa.

Charles Fort wrote 10 novels, although only one, The Outcast Manufacturers, a tenement tale, was published.

Discouraged, Charles Fort burnt the manuscripts, but soon began work on the book that would change the course of his life, The Book of the Damned, which Dreiser helped to get published.

The title referred to "damned" data that Charles Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account, and that was thus rejected or ignored.

Charles Fort was, like his wife, fond of movies, and often took her from their Ryer Avenue apartment to a movie theater nearby, stopping at an adjacent newsstand for an arm full of various newspapers.

Charles Fort frequented the parks near the Bronx, where he sifted through piles of clippings.

Charles Fort often rode the subway down to the main Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he spent many hours reading scientific journals, newspapers, and periodicals from around the world.

Charles Fort had literary friends who gathered at various apartments, including his own, to drink and talk.

Charles Fort was pleasantly surprised to find himself the subject of a cult following.

Later that same day, Charles Fort's publisher visited him to show him the advance copies of Wild Talents.

Charles Fort was interred in the Fort family plot in Albany, New York.

For more than 30 years, Charles Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were not explained well by the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.

Material created by Charles Fort has survived as part of the papers of Theodore Dreiser, held at the University of Pennsylvania.

Charles Fort suggested that a Super-Sargasso Sea exists, into which all lost things go, and justified his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations.

Notable literary contemporaries of Charles Fort's openly admired his writing style and befriended him.

Clark described Charles Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".

Charles Fort was skeptical of sciences and wrote his own mocking explanations to defy scientists who used traditional methods.

Examples of the odd phenomena in Charles Fort's books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal.

Charles Fort offered many reports of out-of-place artifacts, strange items found in unlikely locations.

Charles Fort was perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction, and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, specifically suggesting that strange lights or objects sighted in the skies might be alien spacecraft.

Charles Fort rejected the society and refused the presidency, which went to his friend Dreiser; he was lured to its inaugural meeting by false telegrams.

Charles Fort did hold unofficial meetings and had a long history of getting together informally with many of New York City's literati such as Dreiser and Hecht at their apartments, where they would talk, have a meal, and then listen to brief reports.

Consistently critical of how science studied abnormal phenomena in his day, Charles Fort remains a point of reference for those who engage in such studies today.

Joe Milutis writes a short chapter in his book Failure, a Writer's Life on Charles Fort, characterising Fort's prose as "well-nigh unreadable, yet strangely exhilarating".

In one scene, one of Charles Fort's books is visible on a table in a library and an end credit thanks him by name.

Charles Fort published five books during his lifetime, including one novel.