Rog Phillips

Roger Phillip Graham (February 20, 1909 – March 2, 1966) was an American science fiction writer who was published most often using the name Rog Phillips, but also used other names.

Of his other pseudonyms, only Craig Browning is notable in the genre.

He is associated most with Amazing Stories and is known best for short fiction.

Roger Phillip Graham was born in Spokane, Washington, on February 20, 1909.

Growing up during the Great Depression, Rog became familiar with being on the road which began his love affair with the United States.

His father, John Alfred Graham, a veteran of the Spanish–American War moved his family around the country looking for work.

Despite this Rog received a fine education.

For instance, there was his sophomore year spent at Kingfisher High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But in 1931 he was back in Spokane attending and graduating from Gonzaga University.

He also studied at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Graham was a power plant engineer until the beginning of World War II, when he became a shipyard welder.

He was also a longshoreman during this phase of his life.

After the war Rog became a full-time writer, and wrote some three-million words using a myriad of different pseudonyms.

On October 8, 1938, at the age of twenty-nine, Rog married Eleanor Cora Smith.

They lived together in Kirkland, Washington, with a cat and a dog "trained to do tricks," and he worried "about the termites who [were] eating away at the foundations of his house."

The couple were next-door neighbors to Jack and Dot de Courcy (a couple who would also become science fiction pulp writers as well).

Graham's first published work was a detective story, "Murder Note," as by Charles Mann, that appeared in the Winter 1943 issue of The Masked Detective. However, it was editor of Amazing Stories, Raymond A. Palmer, who started Rog on his science fiction career with a $500 advance in 1945 for his first story, "Let Freedom Ring!"

Graham moved to Evanston, Illinois, to be near Palmer, and associate editor, William Hamling.

By 1946 Rog was divorced from Eleanor.

During this period 1946 to 1953, Rog experienced the height of his success.

His work was catching on.

There is no question that among his best work during this early period were the six stories in his Lefty Baker series: “Squeeze Play" (Amazing Stories, November 1947); “The Immortal Menace” (Amazing Stories, February 1949); “The Insane Robot” (Fantastic Adventures, November 1949); “It’s Like This” (Fantastic Story Quarterly, November 1952); “Lefty Baker’s Nuthouse” (Imaginative Tales, January 1958); “…But Who Knows Huer, or Huen?” (Fantastic, November 1961). After reading each one the reader can tell that Rog had fun writing them. Each Lefty Baker tall-tale drips with his wit and especially his exceptional sense of humor.

In response to falling sales, due to the Shaver Mystery Hoax, Palmer instituted a column in March 1948 of fan news and fanzine reviews in Amazing Stories.

Called The Club House it was a groundbreaking series that brought the entire community together at just the right time.

Conducted by Rog Phillips, now an official staff columnist for Ziff Davis, with just the right flair in his editorials he single-handedly created science fiction fandom as it is now known during the subsequent 57 appearances.

His original work, Time Trap, published by Century Pocket Books in 1949 (#116), has been cited as being one of the first, if not the first, original science fiction paperback ever printed, because it was the first printed in mass-market rack size.

Century Books followed Time Trap by publishing Worlds Within (#124, 1950) and World of If (as by Merit Books, #B-13, 1951).

Of some passing interest the Century/Merit Books publishing house was a notorious Chicago Mob (organized crime) operation.

Organized crime played and continued to play a major part in publishing during this era, mostly due to its almost complete control of distribution throughout the United States.

On Tuesday, October 24, 1951, Graham married Mari Wolf at Country Church in the city of Chicago.

As a wedding gift, publisher William Hamling hired Mari Wolf to write a column identical to The Club House, Fandora's Box, for his fledgling science fiction magazine, Imagination.

The apex to the first half of his science fiction writing career came in July 1952 when he proudly announced in The Club House that Melvin Korshak of Shasta Publishers was going to publish a book of his, Frontiers in the Sky.

Shasta never did.

Shasta was shortly caught up in a scandal of epic proportion when it failed to pay Philip José Farmer for winning a writing contest when he submitted a manuscript for a novel that later became the first in the award-winning Riverworld series To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

As a consequence Shasta folded.

In 1955 Graham divorced Mari Wolf.

He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1959.

Roger Phillip Graham was a man of many names.

He had twenty pseudonyms, including: Clinton Ames, Drew Ames, Robert Arnette, Franklin Bahl, Alexander Blade, Craig Browning, Gregg Conrad, P.F. Costello, Sanandana Kumara, Charles Lee, Charles Mann, Milton Mann, Inez McGowan, Melva Rogers, Chester Ruppert, William Carter Sawtelle, A.R. Steber, Gerald Vance, John H. Wiley, and Peter Worth.

Donald H. Tuck in his bio/bibliography, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vol. 2: Who's Who, M-Z (Advent:Publishers, Chicago, 1978), of Rog Phillips lists several stories of interest, including “Atom War” (Amazing Stories, May 1946); “So Shall Ye Reap!” (Amazing Stories, August 1947); “M’Bong-Ah” (Amazing Stories, February 1949); “The Cyberene” (Imagination, December 1953).