Charles Fort

Charles Fort

BORN6 August 1874, Albany, New York, USA

DIED3 May 1932, The Bronx, New York City, USA

OCCUPATIONWriter, researcher

KNOWN FORThe Book of the Damned (1919); namesake of Forteana

STATUSDeceased

Charles Hoy Fort (6 August 1874 – 3 May 1932) was an American writer and researcher who specialised in collecting and cataloguing reports of anomalous phenomena — events reported in mainstream scientific and news sources but excluded or ignored because they did not fit prevailing scientific theory. The terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are named directly after him, and remain in active use to describe anomalous phenomena in the broad tradition he established.

Early life

Fort was born in Albany, New York, to Dutch immigrant parents who ran a prosperous wholesale grocery business. His mother died before he turned five, and his father, who raised Fort and his two younger brothers alone, was reportedly a physically abusive and authoritarian figure. As a boy, Fort was an enthusiastic amateur naturalist, collecting shells, minerals and birds.

Career

Before turning to full-time writing, Fort worked as a journalist and attempted, without significant commercial success, to build a career as a novelist. He met writer Theodore Dreiser in 1905, and the two became close friends; Dreiser would go on to play a decisive role in Fort's later career. Fort spent much of his adult life conducting research at the New York Public Library and the British Museum, compiling thousands of reports of anomalous events — unexplained falls of frogs, blood-coloured rain, mysterious disappearances, and objects reported in the sky among them — which he referred to as "the damned": data effectively excluded from consideration by mainstream science.

Encouraged by Dreiser to compile these notes into book form, Fort received a modest inheritance from an uncle in 1918 that allowed him to write full-time, and published The Book of the Damned in 1919. He went on to publish three further surviving books — New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932) — with several earlier manuscripts left unfinished or lost. His books attracted a notable, if select, following among literary contemporaries: screenwriter Ben Hecht declared himself, in a review of The Book of the Damned, "the first disciple of Charles Fort," and Fort drew admiration during his lifetime from figures including lawyer Clarence Darrow and writer Sherwood Anderson.

Fort's actual position

Despite his enduring association with paranormal enthusiasm, Fort's own stance was closer to a committed generalised scepticism than to belief in any specific explanation for the anomalies he collected. He was notably reluctant to endorse the movement that formed around him during his own lifetime: writing to Dreiser shortly before his death, Fort said of writer Tiffany Thayer's plan to found a society in his name that he "wouldn't join it, any more than I'd be an Elk." Fort's central interest lay less in proving any particular anomaly genuine than in challenging the certainty of scientific orthodoxy itself, a stance later admirers have described as "agnostic scepticism" toward the material he catalogued. Critics have been considerably less generous: writer Colin Wilson later dismissed Fort as "almost unreadable... a patron saint of cranks."

Death and legacy

Fort's health began to fail in 1932, shortly after completing Wild Talents; he died in the Bronx on 3 May 1932. The Fortean Society, founded the previous year at a meeting in Fort's own New York apartment, continued after his death under Tiffany Thayer's leadership, and Fort's name has since been attached to a wide range of successor publications and organisations, most notably the long-running Fortean Times magazine, founded in 1973. See Forteana for the fuller account of the term and its broader tradition, and Fortean Society for the specific 1931–1959 organisation.

VAULT PROFILE ASSESSMENT

CATEGORY

Writer / Anomaly Researcher

VAULT RELEVANCE

Major

CONNECTION

Namesake and founding figure of the entire Fortean research tradition; foundational influence on how the Vault itself categorises unexplained phenomena broadly

ASSESSMENT

Charles Fort occupies an unusual position as a namesake whose own actual views were more restrained than the movement built in his honour: a committed generalised sceptic whose real interest was in undermining scientific certainty on all sides, rather than a believer in any specific paranormal explanation. That tension between Fort's own studied agnosticism and the more credulous strands of later "Fortean" culture is worth keeping in mind whenever the term is invoked.

See also

• Forteana
• Fortean Society
• Anomalistic Psychology

External links

• Wikipedia — Charles Fort
• The Public Domain Review — Strange Gods: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned