Leigh Brackett
| Leigh Brackett | |
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Brackett in 1941
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| Born | Leigh Douglass Brackett December 7, 1915 Los Angeles, California, US |
| Died | March 18, 1978 (aged 62) Lancaster, California |
| Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Science fiction, crime fiction |
| Notable works | Eric John Stark series |
| Spouse | Edmond Hamilton (m. 1946–77) (until his death) |
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Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915 – March 18, 1978) was an American writer, particularly of science fiction, and has been referred to as the Queen of Space Opera. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on such films as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Leigh Brackett was born December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, California and grew up there. On December 31, 1946, at age 31, she married Edmond Hamilton in San Gabriel, California, and moved with him to Kinsman, Ohio. She died of cancer in 1978 in Lancaster, California.
Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties, the science fiction story Martian Quest, appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940–42) were her most productive; occasional stories have social themes, such as The Citadel of Lost Ships (1943), which considers the effects on the native cultures of alien worlds of Earth's expanding trade empire.
Brackett's first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler (the book led to her first big screenwriting assignment) and Brackett's science fiction stories became more ambitious. Shadow Over Mars (1944) was her first novel-length science fiction story and though somewhat rough-edged, marked the beginning of a new style, strongly influenced by the characterization of the 1940s detective story and film noir.
In 1946 Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton and Planet Stories published the novella Lorelei of the Red Mist, in which the protagonist is a thief called Hugh Starke. Brackett finished the first half before turning it over to Ray Bradbury, so that she could leave to work on The Big Sleep. Brackett returned to science-fiction writing after her cinema work, in 1948. From then on to 1951, she produced a series of science fiction adventure stories that were longer than her previous work, including classic representations of her planetary settings as The Moon that Vanished and the novel Sea-Kings of Mars (1949), later published as The Sword of Rhiannon, a vivid description of Mars before its oceans evaporated.
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