Basil Davenport

Basil Davenport (1905-1966) was a literary critic, US academic, anthologist, author of science fiction novels and other genres. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky March 7, 1905, the son of Ira William Davenport and Emily Andrews Davison. He died on April 7, 1966, in New York County, New York, at the age of 61.

Basil Davenport enlisted in the U. S. Army on March 5, 1943, in New York, during World War II when he was 37 years old.

He had one brother, John A. Davenport.

He frequently wrote introductions to works by other authors, such as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Twenty Years After the Mast by Alexandre Dumas, and The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He wrote a sixty-page introduction to the Utopian novel Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright.

His edited books include The Portable Roman Reader and in 1955 a short critical study, Inquiry into Science Fiction.

His science fiction works included Tales to Be Told in the Dark He was a member of the Hydra Club, a group of sci-fi professionals and their acquaintances who met in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.

For Saturday Review Davenport reviewed James Branch Cabell's novel, Hamlet Had An Uncle, and called Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), Cabell's previous and best-known novel, "a masterpiece." In 1950 he reviewed The Moon is Hell, a collection of science fiction stories by John W. Campbell, Jr. For the NYT he was one of two of the newspaper's staff critics to review Arthur C. Clarke's's most famous book 2001: A Space Odyssey favorably.

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