"Lester Del Rey - Early Del Rey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)

sale, I never considered myself a professional writer. Putting words on paper
was just a (sometimes) lucrative hobby to fall back on when I wasn't doing
something else. Even today, after thirty-seven years of selling stories, with
about forty books and several million words in print, I can't get as
compulsive about writing as I ihould.

I am a compulsive reader, however, and always have been. That began during my
first year of schooling when a marvelous teacher taught me to read well before
I could even pronounce many of the words correctly. There were no extensive
magazine stands or good libraries in the little farming community of
southeastern Minnesota where I grew up. But I was lucky. My father had an
excellent home library. I ploughed my way happily through the complete works
of Darwin, Gibbons' Decline and Fall, and the marvelous works of Jules Verne
and H. G. Wells. I learned to enjoy Shakespeare without really knowing the
difference between a play and a novel. And I spent about equal time going
through the Bible several times and reading the collected works of Robert
Ingersoll.

By all the standard criteria, I should have had a miserable childhood. We
often moved from one poor farm to anotherтАФacting as northern sharecroppers, if
you likeтАФand there were plenty of times when we didn't have much to eat. I was
expected to do most of a man's hard manual labor in the woods and fields from
the age of nine. But the truth is that I look back on it all as a very happy
period. And reading had a lot to do with that, along with a deep sense of
emotional security given by my father. Also, there were many times when the
dollar-a-day wage I earned when working with my father was supplemented by the
kind loan of some popular work of fiction from the farmer for whom we worked.
I read a lot of books after I should have been sleeping, with no light other
than full moonlight! People also saved their used magazines and gave them to
me.

In 1927, when I was barely twelve, my father moved to a small town where I
could have a chance to attend high school, and my horizons were suddenly
broadened by the availability of books and magazines from quite a good local
library. It was there I discovered the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well
as quite a few

early works that could be called science fiction. Then when a friend lent me a
1929 copy of Wonder Stories Quarterly, I became a total addict to that branch
of literature. I left the familiar Earth behind and explored the craters of
the Moon and walked the dead sea bottoms of dying MarsтАФand I never fully
returned from those trips.

This isn't going to be a biography. I intend consistently in these
introductory and commentary passages to skim over things and avoid a lot of
names and events that aren't relevant to my purposeтАФwhich is to show the
development of a writer of science fiction. But I have to state that my life
wasn't all introverted seclusion and reading; that pattern seems to fit a
number of those who did become science fiction fans and writers, but it never
applied to me. I had my circle of friends, and sports were as much a part of