John Drury Clark

John Drury Clark ( born August 15, 1907 in Fairbanks, Alaska; † July 6, 1988 in Denville, New Jersey) was an American rocket fuel developer, chemist and science fiction trailers, and writer. He was responsible for the discovery of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories and influenced the literary careers of L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, and other authors.

Life and career

Clark studied at the University of Alaska and earned the BS at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California in the 1920s. He shared a room there with L. Sprague de Camp. His M. S. he received at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, Ph.D. 1934 at Stanford University. He moved to New York in the 1930s and lived in 1943 in Philadelphia. In 1943 he married the soprano Mildred Baldwin. In 1962 he married Inga Stephens Pratt Clark, the widow of Fletcher Pratt and dedicated his book on Ignition! (Ignition).

In 1933 he published a novel arrangement of the periodic table of the elements, which was published in 1949 as an illustration in the magazine Life. Clark worked in the research division of John Wyeth & Brother, Philadelphia. From 1949 to 1970 Clark developed liquid propellants at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station in Dover (New Jersey).

His archive can be found at Virginia Tech.

Literary influence

Clark was a fan of science fiction and fantasy of the pulp magazine era. Friends of him wrote books and magazine articles, including P. Schuyler Miller, Fletcher Pratt and L. Ron Hubbard.

Clark wrote in 1938, Miller, a description and map of the world of Conan the Barbarian in the fanzine The Hyborian Age and was from then on to a chronicler of Conan readership. As unemployed Clark wrote the mid-1930s two science fiction stories, both published in 1937. He was assisted by L. Sprague de Camp, who was thus self-motivated to start his own literary career. Clark led Camp 1939 in the Wargamerzirkel Fletcher Pratt.

The later sect founder and former booklet writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1941, he brought the idea to the comedic scale fantasy novel The Case of the Friendly Corpse to discs.

Clark's marriage in 1944 led to the founding of the men circle the Trap Door Spiders, which was attended, among others, Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner. Clark inspired in 1952 with a scenario for a " petrified world," several novels by Pratt, H. Beam Piper and Judith Merril.

• Minus Planet. In: Astounding Science Fiction. April 1937.
• Space blister. In: Astounding Science Fiction. August 1937.
• A new periodic chart. In: Journal of Chemical Education. Volume 10, 1933, pp. 675-657.
• A modern periodic chart of chemical elements. In: Science. Volume 111, 1950, pp. 661-663.
• With P. Schuyler Miller: A Probable Outline of Conan 's Career. In: The Hyborian Age. In 1938.
• Introduction to The Petrified Planet (1952) ( reused for Uller Uprising, by H. Beam Piper (1983)).
• The silicones World. In: Startling Stories. December 1952.
• With P. Schuyler Miller: An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian. In: The Coming of Conan. In 1953.
• With P. Schuyler Miller and L. Sprague de Camp: An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian. In: Amra. Volume 2, no. 4, 1959.
• Science Fact: Shattered Dimensions, Anyone? In: Analog Science Fiction - Science Fact. November 1966.
• Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press, 1972, ISBN 0813507251, p 214