Charles Fort Biography

Charles Fort was a forward thinker that was well ahead of his times. He studied phenomenon that people had accepted as simply weird happenings. Fort despised the teaching and studying of authoritative science that had many facts associated with them but of which those facts were not investigated to get to the real truth. Born on August 9, 1874, Fort wanted to become a studier of nature throughout his child but instead he entered the world of journalism when he was seventeen. At nineteen he decided that he wanted to travel and so he visited many places including New Orleans, New York, Nova Scotia, England, Scotland, Wales and South Africa. This travelling not only made an impression on him but would become his foundation for studying and analyzing facts.

On October 26, 1896 he married Anna Filing in New York. They were extremely poor with Charles taking on odd jobs while he wrote. He first began selling feature stories to the press in New York and that led him to writing a number of comedic short stories. In 1909 he published one of his many novels, The Outcast Manufacturers. Fort was passionate about learning and not only was he always reading but he was constantly taking notes and visiting the New York Public Library while trying to determine what his own personal philosophy would be.

Fort inherited a share of his grandfather’s estate in 1916 and the next year, he inherited a share of his brother’s estate after the passing of his brother as well. Now that he had the freedom which poverty does not permit, he dedicated his life to exploring the unexplained. He had become obsessed about those things that was rejected by conventional science or explained with no real thought process behind it. These things included UFOs and spontaneous human combustion. These thoughts led him to his second published work The Book of the Damned, with the damned being everything that conventional science could not, or would not, explain. In the book he spoke of mysterious objects falling from the sky, strange disappearances and reappearances, and astronomical ambiguities.

The book was widely accepted by respected folks such as Booth Tarkington, John Cooper Powys, and Ben Hecht. Spurned on by not his success but his own passion for the subject, Fort published three more books including New Lands in 1923, Lo! in 1931, and Wild Talents in 1932. Shortly after the last was published, Fort died on May 3, 1932 with his wife following his passing five years later.

Because he brought subjects to the forefront that would have otherwise been shrugged off or forgotten entirely, after his death Tiffany Thayer created the Fortean Society so that his work could be continued and his books could continue to be promoted. However, Thayer died in 1959 and the group no longer met or worked in Fort’s name. However, the International Fortean Organization was created in 1965.