Robert Albert Bloch (April 5, 1917, Chicago-September 23, 1994, Los Angeles) was a prolific American writer. He was the son of Raphael "Ray" Bloch (1884, Chicago-1952, Chicago), a bank cashier, and his wife Stella Loeb (1880, Attica, Indiana-1944, Milwaukee, WI), a social worker, both of German-Jewish descent. April 5 is the 95th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (96th in leap years). ... 1917 (MCMXVII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Tuesday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar. ... Nickname: The Windy City, The Second City, Chi Town, The City of Big Shoulders The 312 Motto: Urbs In Horto (Latin: City in a Garden), I Will Location in Chicagoland and Illinois Coordinates: Country United States State Illinois County Cook Incorporated March 4, 1837 Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) Area... September 23 is the 266th day of the year (267th in leap years). ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by United Nations. ... Flag Seal Nickname: City of Angels Location Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California Coordinates , Government State County California Los Angeles County Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) Geographical characteristics Area     City 1,290. ... 1884 (MDCCCLXXXIV) is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1880 (MDCCCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... Attica is a city located in Fountain County, Indiana. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1944 calendar). ... This article is about Milwaukee in Wisconsin. ... The word Jew ( Hebrew: יהודי) is used in a wide number of ways, but generally refers to a follower of the Jewish faith, a child of a Jewish mother, or someone of Jewish descent with a connection to Jewish culture or ethnicity and often a combination...

Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, usually crime fiction, science fiction, and, perhaps most influentially, horror fiction. He was a contributor to pulp magazines like Weird Tales in his early career, and was also a prolific screenwriter. He was the recipient of the Hugo Award (for his story "The Hell-Bound Train"), the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America. Sherlock Holmes, pipe-puffing hero of crime fiction, confers with his colleague Dr. Watson; together these characters popularized the genre. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the reader. ... Flynns Detective Fiction from 1941. ... This page is about the fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine and its heirs. ... Screenwriters, scenarists or script writers, are authors who write the screenplays from which movies and television programs are made. ... The 2005 Hugo Award with base designed by Deb Kosiba. ... The Bram Stoker Award is a recognition presented by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for superior achievement in horror writing. ... First awarded in 1975, the World Fantasy Awards are handed out annually at the World Fantasy Convention (WFC) to recognize outstanding achievement in the field of fantasy. ... The Mystery Writers of America are an organization for mystery writers. ...

Robert Bloch was also a major contributor to science fiction fanzines and fandom in general. In the 1940s, he created the humorous character Lefty Feep in a story for Fantastic Adventures. He also worked for a time in vaudeville. He was a good friend of the science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. A science fiction fanzine is an amateur or semi-professional magazine published by members of science fiction fandom, from the 1930s to the present day. ... Fandom (from the noun fan and the affix -dom, as in kingdom, dukedom, etc. ... Vaudeville is a style of multi-act theatre which flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. ... Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (1902-December 14, 1935) was an American science fiction author. ...

Early writing career

During the 1930s, Bloch was an avid reader of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. H. P. Lovecraft, a frequent contributor to that magazine, became one of his favorite writers. As a teenager, Bloch befriended and corresponded with Lovecraft, who gave the promising youngster advice on his own fiction-writing efforts.^[1] Bloch's first professional sales, at the age of just seventeen, were to Weird Tales with the short stories "The Feast in the Abbey" and "The Secret in the Tomb". Bloch's early stories were strongly influenced by Lovecraft, and a number of his stories were set in, and extended, the world of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. It was Bloch who invented, for example, the oft-cited Mythos texts De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction. ... Cthulhu Mythos is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated writers. ... Many fictional works of arcane literature appear is the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. ... Many fictional works of arcane literature appear in the Cthulhu Mythos. ...

The young Bloch even appears, thinly disguised, as the character "Robert Blake" in Lovecraft's story "The Haunter of the Dark", which is dedicated to Bloch. In this story, Lovecraft kills off the Bloch character, repaying a courtesy Bloch paid Lovecraft with his tale "The Shambler from the Stars", in which the Lovecraft-inspired figure dies. (Bloch even had a signed certificate from Lovecraft giving Bloch permission to kill Lovecraft off in a story.) Bloch later wrote a third tale, "The Shadow From the Steeple", picking up where "The Haunter of the Dark" finished. Robert Harrison Blake is a fictional character in the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. ... The Haunter of the Dark is a horror story by H.P. Lovecraft. ...

After Lovecraft's death in 1937, Bloch continued writing for Weird Tales, where he became one its its most popular authors. He also began contributing to other pulps, such as the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. He gradually evolved away from Lovecraftian imitations towards a unique style of his own. One of the first distinctly "Blochian" stories was "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", which was published in Weird Tales in 1943. The story was Bloch's take on the Jack the Ripper legend, and was filled out with more genuine factual details of the case than many other fictional treatments.[1] Bloch followed up this story with a number of others in a similar vein dealing with half-historic, half-legendary figures such as the Man in the Iron Mask ("Iron Mask", 1944), the Marquis de Sade ("The Skull of the Marquis de Sade", 1945) and Lizzie Borden ("Lizzie Borden Took an Axe...", 1946). Amazing Stories magazine, sometimes retitled Amazing Science Fiction, began in April 1926, becoming the first science fiction magazine and one of the pioneers of science fiction in the United States. ... Jack the Ripper is the pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London, England in the second half of 1888. ... The Man in the Iron Mask was a prisoner held in a number of prisons, including the Bastille, during the reign of Louis XIV of France. ... Portrait of the Marquis de Sade by Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (c. ... Lizzie Borden Lizzie Andrew Borden (July 19, 1860 – June 1, 1927) was a New England spinster and a central figure in the case surrounding the brutal axe double-murder of her father and stepmother on a sweltering day, August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. ...

Politics

In 1939, Bloch was contacted by James Doolittle, who was managing the campaign for a little-known assistant attorney in Milwaukee, Wisconsin named Carl Zeidler. He was asked to work on his speechwriting, advertising, and photo ops, in collaboration with Harold Gauer. They created elaborate campaign shows; in Bloch's 1993 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he gives an inside account of the campaign, and the innovations he and Gauer came up with — for instance, the original releasing-balloons-from-the-ceiling shtick. He comments bitterly on how, after Zeidler's victory, they were ignored and not even paid their promised salaries. He ends the story with a wryly philosophical point: There are a few persons named James Doolittle: James Rood Doolittle, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, 1857-1869 Jimmy Doolittle, U.S. Army General, World War II hero, aviator This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Nickname: Cream City, Mil Town, Brew City, The City of Festivals Location of Milwaukee in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Coordinates: County Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett Area    - City 251. ... Carl Zeidler (c. ...

If Carl Zeidler had not asked Jim Doolittle to manage his campaign, Doolittle would never have contacted me about it. And the only reason Doolittle knew me to begin with was because he read my yarn ("The Cloak") in Unknown.

Rattling this chain of circumstances, one may stretch it a bit further. If I had not written a little vampire story called "The Cloak", Carl Zeidler might never have become mayor of Milwaukee.

Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897 This article deals with vampires in folklore and legends. ...

Psycho and screenwriting

Bloch became most famous as the author of the novel Psycho, which was adapted by Joseph Stefano into the screenplay for the film of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. His best-known work as a screenwriter is probably The Night Walker (1964), which he wrote for William Castle, although he also penned several scripts for the original series of Star Trek; he seemed happiest, among his television work, with his contributions to the Boris Karloff-hosted series Thriller. Psycho is a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch. ... Joseph Stefano (5 May 1922 - 25 August 2006) was an American screenwriter. ... A screenplay or script is a blueprint for producing a motion picture. ... Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) was a highly influential director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. ... William Castle (April 24, 1914–May 31, 1977) born William Schloss, was an American film director, producer, and actor. ... Star Trek is an American science fiction franchise. ... Boris Karloff (November 23, 1887 in East Dulwich, London, England – February 2, 1969) was an English actor best known for his roles in horror films. ... Thriller was, along with The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the great anthology television series of the 1960s, running from 1960-1962 on NBC-TV. The show featured host Boris Karloff introducing an entertaining mix of macabre horror tales and suspense thrillers. ...

Bloch also contributed to Harlan Ellison's science fiction anthology, Dangerous Visions. His story, "A Toy for Juliette", evoked both the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper. In fact, Ellison's own contribution to the anthology was a direct follow-up of Bloch's, and was titled "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World". Harlan Jay Ellison (born May 27, 1934) is a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, essays, and criticism. ... Dangerous Visions (ISBN 0-425-06176-0) was a path-breaking science fiction short story anthology edited by Harlan Ellison and published in 1967. ... A Toy for Juliette is a short story by Robert Bloch from Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions, about Jack the Ripper, being pulled into the future by a sadistic femme fatale, and her mysterious grandfather. ... Portrait of the Marquis de Sade by Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (c. ... Jack the Ripper is the pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London, England in the second half of 1888. ... In Harlan Ellisons 1969 anthology, Dangerous Visions, he presents a collection of several different views of science fiction and fantasy, through 34 authors (himself included). ...

Bloch died in 1994 and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Cemetery view looking South-East. ...

Writings on Bloch

There is an essay on his work, with particular reference to the novels Psycho and The Scarf, in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). Joshi examines Bloch's literary relationship with Lovecraft in a further essay in The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). Sunanda Tryambak Joshi (b. ...

In addition, Randall D. Larson has authored three reference books about Robert Bloch: The Robert Bloch Reader's Guide (1986, a literary analysis of Bloch's entire output through 1986), The Complete Robert Bloch (1986, an illustrated bibliography of Bloch's writing), and The Robert Bloch Companion (1986, collected interviews).

A compilation of Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos fiction, titled Mysteries of the Worm, was published by Chaosium with commentary by Robert M. Price. Chaosium is one of the longer lived publishers of role_playing games still in existence. ... Robert McNair Price was born July 7, 1954 in Mississippi and is a Professor of Theology and Scriptural Studies. ...

Books and Media

Novels

• The Scarf (1947, rev. 1966)
• Spiderweb (1954)
• The Kidnapper (1954)
• The Will to Kill (1954)
• Shooting Star (1958)
• Psycho (1959)
• The Dead Beat (1960)
• Firebug (1961)
• The Couch (1962)
• Terror (1962)
• Ladies Day / This Crowded Earth (1968)
• The Star Stalker (1968)
• The Todd Dossier (1969)
• Sneak Preview (1971)
• It's All in Your Mind (1971)
• Night World (1972)
• American Gothic (1974)
• Strange Eons (1978) (a Cthulhu Mythos novel)
• There Is a Serpent in Eden (1979)
• Psycho II (1982) (unrelated to the film of the same name)
• Night of the Ripper (1984)
• Unholy Trinity (1986) (collects The Scarf, The Couch and The Dead Beat)
• Lori (1989)
• Psycho House (1990)
• The Jekyll Legacy (1991)

Psycho is a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch. ... Psycho II is a 1982 novel that Robert Bloch wrote as a sequel to his 1959 novel Psycho. ... Psycho II is a 1983 sequel to Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho. ... Psycho House (sometimes refered to as Psycho House: Psycho III) is a 1990 novel that Robert Bloch wrote as a sequel to his 1959 novel Psycho and 1982 novel Psycho II. The novel is not related to the 1986 film Psycho III, which follows a different story continuity from the...

Short-story collections

• The Opener of the Way (1945)
• Sea Kissed (1945)
• Terror in the Night (1958)
• Pleasant Dreams (1960)
• Blood Runs Cold (1961)
• Nightmares (1961)
• More Nightmares (1961)
• Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1962)
• Atoms and Evil (1962)
• Horror 7 (1963)
• Bogey Men (1963)
• House of the Hatchet (1965)
• The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1965)
• Tales in a Jugular Vein (1965)
• Chamber of Horrors (1966)
• The Living Demons (1967)
• Dragons and Nightmares (1968)
• Bloch and Bradbury (1969)
• Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow (1971)
• House of the Hatchet (1976)
• The King of Terrors (1977)
• The Best of Robert Bloch (1977)
• Cold Chills (1977)
• Out of the Mouths of Graves (1978)
• Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of (1979)
• Mysteries of the Worm (1981)
• Midnight Pleasures (1987)
• Lost in Space and Time With Lefty Feep (1987)
• The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch: Volume 1: Final Reckonings (1987)
• The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch: Volume 2: Bitter Ends (1987)
• The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch: Volume 3: Last Rites (1987)
• Fear and Trembling (1989)
• Screams (1989)
• Mysteries of the Worm (rev. 1993)
• The Early Fears (1994)
• Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master (1995)
• Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998)
• The Lost Bloch: Volume 1: The Devil With You! (1999)
• The Lost Bloch: Volume 2: Hell on Earth (2000)
• The Lost Bloch: Volume 3: Crimes and Punishments (2002)
• The Reader's Bloch: Volume 1: The Fear Planet and Other Unusual Destinations (2005)

Non-fiction

• The Eighth Stage of Fandom (1962)
• Out of My Head (1986)
• Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography (1993)

Reference

1. ^ Haining, Peter (1975). The Fantastic Pulps. Victor Gollancz Ltd. ISBN 0-575-02000-8.

Victor Gollancz Ltd was a British book publisher founded by Victor Gollancz in 1927; its most notable authors were George Orwell and Ford Madox Ford. ...

External links

• The Bat Is My Brother: The Unofficial Robert Bloch Website
• Open Directory category: Bloch, Robert
• Robert Bloch at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a database of bibliographic information on science fiction and related genres such as fantasy fiction and horror fiction. ...

See Also

• List of horror fiction authors