by Kacey Stapleton

Created on: October 05, 2010   Last Updated: October 06, 2010

Researchers into the paranormal are usually looking for answers.  Charles Fort treasured the questions. He explored those areas of mystery where science feared to tread and where known facts and logic couldn’t help.  He gave the paranormal community a new term to classify unorthodox stories and claims.  Unexplainable puzzles too mystifying to even wrap one’s mind around are referred to as Fortean.  

Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York to Dutch immigrant parents.  He was not a noteworthy student, but this could have been the result of his mistrust of authority.  By Fort’s own accounts the author wrote later in life his father was often harsh and occasionally physical abusive.  As a young man, he did have an interest in natural science, but books were his passion.  Wanting to become a writer, he left home at 18 to travel and gain real world experience.  He saw much of the Western United States, Scotland, and England, but fell ill in Southern Africa.  Back in Albany once more he married Anna Filing whom he had known as a child.  The couple moved to England where Fort attempted a career as a short story writer.  Like many writers, he found successful sales were frequently followed by dry spells and Fort was forced to take odd jobs to support his new wife and himself.  When an uncle passed away leaving him a small inheritance Fort began writing full time. 

Fort wanted a career writing fiction and he did attract the attention of other writers such as Theodore Dreiser who attempted to help the young author get published.  Fort’s fictional work The Outcast Manufactures did not sale well commercially, and publishers did not accept his other submissions. 

Charles Fort was disheartened, but with the encouragement of his wife the author began to put together, a book taken from his collection of newspaper and magazine clippings combined with his own notes.  Fort ‘s collection started during his travels as a young man and the focus was clearly on the supernatural and the unusual. 

Fort’s first offering The Book of the Damned was published, and met with criticism not only for the strange subject matter, but due in part to the author’s somewhat florid style of writing. Others such Clarence Darrow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Fort’s long time defender Theodore Dreiser praised the book.  More importantly for the

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