Charles Beaumont

Charles Beaumont was the pseudonym for Charles Leroy Nutt, born on Chicago's North Side on January 2 1929. He also occasionally wrote under the names Charles McNutt and E. T. Beaumont (the latter apparently based on the name of a Texas town). Tragically short-lived, Beaumont was a dynamic and imaginative author and screenwriter of macabre, cautionary tales -- frequently tinged with black humour -- blending the genres of science-fiction, fantasy and horror.

For a time in the 1950s he wrote movie reviews for "The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction". In one of his columns he panned both Not of This Earth (1957) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), both directed by his future employer, Roger Corman.

By the time he was twenty, he wrote prolifically, but remained unable to sell any of his first seventy-two stories, until the science-fiction magazine 'Amazing Stories' showed interest in "The Devil, You Say?", which was eventually published in early 1951. By the end of the decade, he had successfully segued into writing for films and television.

His September 1954 short story "Black Country" was the first original work of fiction published by "Playboy" magazine (it was the magazine's ninth issue).

Much of Beaumont's early work was published in an anthology entitled "The Hunger and Other Stories", by Putnam in 1957.

He also wrote an earlier script for Queen of Outer Space (1958) as a spoof, later ruefully commenting, that neither the director nor the cast seemed to have noticed that fact. Beaumont had an extremely troubled childhood, which he later referred to as "one big Charles Addams cartoon". His mentally unstable mother at one time dressed him in girl's clothes and killed one of his pets as a form of punishment (this later inspired his short story "Miss Gentillbelle"). He was eventually farmed out to the care of five widowed aunts, who operated a boarding house and regaled young Charles with nightly tales, detailing the peculiar demise of each of their husbands. Somehow, perhaps unsurprisingly, young Charles developed his macabre sense of humour. He first became interested in science fiction in his teens. He found school entirely boring, dropping out in the tenth grade. Then came a brief stint in the U. S. Army, but he was discharged after just three months for medical reasons (back problems). With little success, he tried his hand at acting, then sold illustrations to pulp magazines, worked as a railroad clerk in Mobile, Alabama; as an animator at MGM, even as a dishwasher.

With the sole exception of Rod Serling, he was the single most important creative force in the early years of The Twilight Zone (1959), responsible for many classic episodes, including "Perchance to Dream" (adapted from his original story, first published in 'Playboy' magazine in November 1958), "Printer's Devil" (from "The Devil, You Say?", his very first story, published in 'Amazing Stories', January 1951), "The Jungle" ('If' magazine, December 1954) and "In His Image" (one of the stories from his collection "Yonder", published in 1958).

He also scripted or co-scripted several movies, including Roger Corman's Premature Burial (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963) (Beaumont only took the title from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, adapting the actual story from H. P.

Lovecraft's novel "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward") and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).