Fanny Ellsworth

Fanny Louise Ellsworth Davis (October 10, 1904 – 1984), known professionally as Fanny Ellsworth, was an American magazine editor, best known as the editor of pulp magazines including Ranch Romances (for western romances) and Black Mask (for noir detective thrillers).

Late in life, she became a Turkish studies scholar, interested in the status of women in the Ottoman Empire.

Fanny Louise Ellsworth was born in New York City, the daughter of Jesse F. Ellsworth and Martha Kelly Ellsworth.

Her father was a banker.

Ellsworth was the editor of Ranch Romances, from the 1920s into the 1950s.

She bought over 30 western stories from Elmer Kelton for Ranch Romances; other noted authors she published included Lela Cole Kitson, Walt Coburn and Max Brand.

She also worked with western genre artist Harold Dowd Bugbee.

She graduated from Barnard College in 1926.

In 1934, Fanny Ellsworth married fellow magazine editor John Earle "Jack" Davis.

As "F. Ellsworth", she succeeded Joseph Shaw as editor of Black Mask, a magazine for detective fiction, from 1936 to 1940, promoting noir genre authors including Steve Fisher, Frank Gruber, and Cornell Woolrich.

Ellsworth is best known as an editor, but she also wrote several pulp stories, including "Winter Night" (Street & Smith's Love Story Magazine 1941), and "A Toast to All of Us" (Ranch Romances 1949).

Other magazines she worked at as an editor included Big Story Magazine, Rangeland Love Story Magazine, Thrilling Ranch Stories, Western Love Stories, Western Rodeo Romances, Space Stories, Startling Stories, and Fantastic Story Magazine. In the late 1950s, she was advertising manager for the Barnard Alumnae Magazine.

She was managing editor and briefly executive editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1952 to 1953.

Fanny Ellsworth Davis became interested in Turkish history while writing a children's book, Getting to Know Turkey (1957).

Later in life, Fanny Ellsworth Davis completed doctoral studies at Columbia University, with a dissertation titled "Two Centuries of the Ottoman Lady" (1968).

She published books based on her doctoral work, The Palace of Topkapi in Istanbul (1970), The Clocks and watches of the Topkapı Palace Museum (1984), and The Ottoman Lady: A social history from 1718 to 1918 (published posthumously in 1986).