Mary Elizabeth Counselman
| Mary Elizabeth Counselman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 19, 1911 Birmingham, Alabama, United States |
| Died | November 13, 1995 (aged 83) |
| Pen name | Charles Dubois, Sanders McCrorey, and John Starr |
| Occupation | short story writer, poet |
| Nationality | United States |
| Genre | horror, fantasy |
Mary Elizabeth Counselman (November 19, 1911 – November 13, 1995) was an American writer of short stories and poetry.
Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on November 19, 1911 in Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry as a child and sold her first poem at the age of six. She later moved to Gainesville, Georgia, where her father was a faculty member at the Riverside Military Academy. She attended the University of Alabama and Alabama College (now Montevallo University).
Counselman's work appeared in Weird Tales, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and other magazines. Her stories were dramatized on General Electric Theater and other national television programs in the USA, Canada, the British Isles, and Australia.
Her tale "The Three Marked Pennies", written while she was in her teens, and published in Weird Tales in 1934, was one of the three most popular in all of Weird Tales history. Readers mentioned it in letters for years after its publication.
Another story, "Seventh Sister" published in Weird Tales in January 1943, is a rare example of a voodoo story written by a woman.
In describing her philosophy of writing horror fiction, she said, "The Hallowe'en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared."
Later, Counselman worked as a reporter for The Birmingham News. Counselman taught creative writing classes at Gadsden State Junior College (now the Wallace Drive Campus of Gadsden State Community College) and at the University of Alabama.
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