Norman L. Knight

Norman Louis Knight (September 21, 1895 – April 19, 1972) was an American chemist and writer of fantasy and science fiction.^[1] His most prominent work is probably A Torrent of Faces, a novel cowritten with James Blish and reprinted in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line/^[2]

Knight was born at St. Joseph, Missouri on September 21, 1895, at 2109 Messanie Road with his father Louis Ruthven Knight, and his mother Mary E. Knight (née Stauber). Norman's father was a druggist, and the family lived over the family drug store.

While not much of his fiction is remembered today, it was noticed during original publication. Particularly the short story Saurian Valedictory, published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1939, was praised by famous science fiction couple Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, who made a comment that "It was a brilliant achievement and nobody seems to have heard of it, or him. It was an attempt to depict a reptilian civilization before Man. It succeeded triumphantly; the values were all so different, the psychology", and described it as "One of the really great stories on alien mentality".^[3]

Knight was a young man in St Joseph, Missouri in the early part of the 20th century. He joined the US Army Signal Corps in 1917, and was sent to France where his initial service was interrupted with a hospital; stay due to influenza. Upon release he was delivering messages between commands via horseback. When Knight was released from service after the war, his first job was with the nascent National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa, where at a Summer picnic, he met Marie Sarah Yenn, who was to become his wife. They had one child, a girl named Paula Marie.

• Norman L. Knight at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database