Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher who focused on unusual events that seemed to go against scientific understanding. The words "Fortean" and "Forteana" are sometimes used to describe these types of events. Fort’s books, such as The Book of the Damned (1919), were popular and are still available today. His work continues to inspire fans, who call themselves "Forteans," and has influenced some science fiction stories.
Fort collected examples of scientific mysteries and shared them in his writings. These collections inspired many science fiction writers by showing doubt about scientific limits and offering new ideas. "Fortean" events are occurrences that appear to challenge what science typically accepts. The Fortean Times, a magazine started as The News in 1973 and renamed in 1976, studies such unusual events.
Biography
Fort was born in Albany, New York, in 1874. He had Dutch heritage. His father was a grocer and very strict. In his book Many Parts, Fort wrote about being physically hurt by his father. His biographer, Damon Knight, said Fort’s distrust of authority started because of his childhood experiences. Fort became very independent during his early years.
As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist. He collected seashells, minerals, and birds. Though he was curious and smart, he was not a good student. He was self-taught, and his knowledge came mostly from reading many books.
At age 18, Fort left New York to travel the world to gain life experiences. He visited the western United States, Scotland, and England before becoming sick in Southern Africa. When he returned home, Anna Filing, someone he had known since childhood, cared for him. They married on October 26, 1896, at an Episcopal church. For a few years, Fort and Anna lived in poverty in the Bronx while he tried to earn money by writing stories for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, Fort began collecting reports of strange events.
His uncle, Frank A. Fort, died in 1916, and Fort received a small inheritance. This allowed him to stop working other jobs and write full-time. In 1917, Fort’s brother, Clarence, died. The inheritance was then split between Fort and his other brother, Raymond.
Fort’s work as a journalist, along with his cleverness and willingness to question others, helped him write books that made fun of scientists’ overconfidence and the way journalists and editors often explained things in a way that seemed logical.
Fort wrote 10 novels, but only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), was published. Reviews were mostly positive, but the book did not sell well. In 1915, Fort began writing two books, X and Y. The first book talked about beings from Mars controlling events on Earth. The second book described a hidden, dangerous civilization near the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser, who tried to get them published but failed. Feeling discouraged, Fort burned the manuscripts. He then started work on The Book of the Damned (1919), which Dreiser helped publish. The title referred to strange facts that science could not explain.
Between 1920 and 1928, Fort and Anna lived in London so Fort could research at the British Museum. Most of his life, Fort lived in the Bronx. He and Anna enjoyed movies and often went to theaters near their apartment on Ryer Avenue. He also read newspapers at a nearby newsstand. Fort spent time in Bronx parks, sorting through newspaper clippings. He often took the subway to the main Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he read scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines from around the world. Fort had friends who met at apartments, including his own, to talk and drink.
Fort was surprised to find that people admired his work. Some readers formed groups to study the strange events described in his books. Jerome Clark wrote that Fort found this amusing but still answered letters from readers who sent him reports about unusual events. Historian Mitch Horowitz compared Fort’s career to Edgar Allan Poe’s, saying Fort created a genre for stories about strange facts, much like Poe did for horror stories. Both writers lived in poverty, received uneven praise, and were later celebrated.
Fort did not trust doctors and avoided medical help as his health worsened. He focused on finishing his book Wild Talents. On May 3, 1932, Fort collapsed and was taken to the Royal Hospital. Later that day, his publisher showed him the advance copies of Wild Talents. Fort died a few hours later, likely from leukemia. He was buried in the Fort family plot in Albany, New York.
Fort and the unexplained
For more than 30 years, Charles Fort visited libraries in New York City and London. He carefully read scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes about events that were not fully explained by the theories and beliefs of his time.
Fort took thousands of notes during his life. In a short story he wrote without a date, titled "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman," Fort mentioned thinking about burning some of his 48,000 notes. He also said he once let a few notes blow away in the wind because he was too lazy to save them. A man on a nearby park bench returned the notes to him. The notes were written in small handwriting on cards and scraps of paper stored in shoeboxes. More than once, Fort felt sad and destroyed his work, but he started over again. Some of his notes were published in the magazine Doubt, and after the magazine’s editor, Tiffany Thayer, died in 1959, most of the notes were given to the New York Public Library. They are still available for researchers to use. Some of Fort’s materials are also kept in the papers of Theodore Dreiser, stored at the University of Pennsylvania.
From his research, Fort wrote four books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). He wrote another book between New Lands and Lo!, but he stopped working on it and included its ideas in Lo!.
Fort suggested that a place called the Super-Sargasso Sea exists, where all lost things go. He claimed his theories matched the data as well as the explanations scientists used. Fort himself said, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written."
Many famous writers of Fort’s time admired his work and became his friends. These included Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Sherwood Anderson, Clarence Darrow, and Booth Tarkington, who wrote the introduction to New Lands.
After Fort’s death, writer Colin Wilson said Fort likely did not take his own explanations seriously. Wilson noted Fort did not try to present clear arguments and called him "a patron saint of cranks." He also compared Fort to Robert Ripley, a cartoonist who wrote about unusual events. Wilson criticized Fort’s writing as "atrocious" and "almost unreadable," but he admitted the facts Fort presented were surprising. Wilson said Fort’s work made him realize that even honest scientists might be influenced by unconscious ideas that stop them from being completely objective. Fort’s main idea was that people who want to believe in wonders are no more biased than those who want to disbelieve in them.
In contrast, Jerome Clark said Fort was a satirist who doubted people’s, especially scientists’, claims to know everything. Clark described Fort’s writing as a mix of humor, deep understanding, and boldness. Fort was skeptical of science and wrote funny explanations to challenge scientists who used traditional methods.
A review of Lo! in The New York Times said reading Fort was like riding a comet. After returning to Earth, readers might feel a new, exciting emotion that changes how they read scientific books in the future.
Examples of unusual events in Fort’s books include teleportation (a term Fort is often credited with inventing), falling frogs and fish, spontaneous human combustion, ball lightning, poltergeist activity, unexplained noises, levitation, unidentified flying objects, disappearances, giant wheels of light in the ocean, and animals found outside their usual habitats. Fort also wrote about strange items found in unexpected places, called out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts). He may have been the first person to suggest that strange human disappearances could be explained by alien abduction.
People who admire Fort’s work sometimes call themselves "Forteans." The first was Ben Hecht, a screenwriter, who said, "I am the first disciple of Charles Fort… henceforth, I am a Fortean."
What the term "Fortean" means is debated. Some use it for people who follow Fort’s methods, while others use it for those who believe in paranormal events. Most Forteans are interested in unexplained natural events and remain skeptical about whether these events are real. For Hecht, being a Fortean meant distrust of all authority, not belief in the strange events Fort wrote about.
The Fortean Society was started on January 26, 1931, at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City by Fort’s friends, including writers like Hecht, Dreiser, and Alexander Woollcott. It was organized by Thayer, who did so partly seriously and partly for fun, like Fort’s own work. The society’s founders included Dreiser, Hecht, Tarkington, Powys, Aaron Sussman, Harry Leon Wilson, Woollcott, and J. David Stern. Prominent science-fiction writers like Knight and Eric Frank Russell were active members.
Fort refused to join the society and declined its presidency, which went to Dreiser. He was tricked into attending its first meeting with fake telegrams. Fort did not want to be an authority figure and worried the society would attract people who believed in supernatural events, which went against Forteanism. Instead, Fort met informally with writers like Dreiser and Hecht at their homes, where they talked, ate, and shared short reports.
The magazine Fortean Times, first published in November 1973, promotes Fortean journalism by combining humor, skepticism, and serious research on topics scientists often ignore. Another group, the International Fortean Organization (INFO), was formed in the early 1960s by brothers Ron and Paul Willis. They collected materials from the Fortean Society, which had mostly ended by 1959 after Thayer’s death. INFO publishes the INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown and continues Fort’s legacy.
Literary influence
Many modern writers, both fiction and nonfiction, who have written about Charles Fort's influence truly believe in his ideas. One well-known example is John Michell, a British philosopher who wrote the introduction to the 1996 edition of Lo! published by John Brown. Michell stated that Fort did not create a specific worldview, but the evidence Fort collected led him to believe that reality is more magical and carefully organized than most people today think. Stephen King also used Fort's work to help develop his characters, especially in the books It and Firestarter. In Firestarter, the parents of a child with special powers are told to read Fort's Wild Talents instead of the baby care book by Benjamin Spock.
Loren Coleman, a famous cryptozoologist, wrote The Unidentified (1975), which is dedicated to Fort, and Mysterious America, a book Fortean Times called a classic. Coleman said he was the first Vietnam-era conscientious objector to base his pacifist beliefs on Fort's ideas. Jerome Clark described himself as a "skeptical Fortean." Mike Dash, another Fortean, uses his skills as a historian to study unusual reports while avoiding blindly accepting any belief, whether from fringe groups or mainstream science. Science-fiction writers like Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson were also fans of Fort's work. Alfred Bester's novel, The Stars My Destination, honors Fort by naming the first teleporter "Charles Fort Jaunte." William R. Corliss continued Fort's work by collecting and commenting on unusual events in his self-published books.
In 1939, Eric Frank Russell published the novel Sinister Barrier, which explicitly names Fort as an influence. Russell included some of Fort's findings in the story. In chapter 3 of William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, the main character quotes Fort’s The Book of the Damned and paraphrases parts of it. Ivan T. Sanderson, a Scottish naturalist and writer, often referenced Fort in his books on unexplained phenomena, such as Things (1967) and More Things (1969). Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s book The Morning of the Magicians was heavily influenced by Fort’s work. Donald Jeffries’s 2007 novel The Unreals frequently mentions Fort. Joe Milutis wrote a chapter in his book Failure, a Writer's Life about Fort, describing his writing as "hard to read, yet exciting."
Lionel Fanthorpe, a UK paranormalist and ordained priest, created the Fortean TV series on Channel 4 from 1997 to 1998. The 1999 movie Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, includes themes about unexplained events inspired by Fort’s 1920s and 1930s works. Loren Coleman wrote about Magnolia in one of his books, noting its hidden Fortean themes, such as "falling frogs." In one scene, a copy of Fort’s book is shown on a table, and the credits thank him by name. In the 2011 film The Whisperer in Darkness, Fort is played by Andrew Leman.
Fredric Brown, an American crime and science-fiction writer, included a quote from Fort’s Wild Talents as an epigraph in his novel Compliments of a Fiend. The quote asks, "Was someone collecting Ambroses?" Brown’s story involves a character named Ambrose who disappears, and the kidnapper calls himself the "Ambrose collector" as a tribute to Fort. In Blue Balliett’s bestselling children’s novel, Chasing Vermeer, Fort is mentioned several times, including the fact that one of the main characters reads and is inspired by Fort’s book Lo!.
Works
Fort wrote and released five books during his lifetime, one of which was a novel. All five books can be found online (see the External links section below).
Posthumous editions: