Bassett Morgan (b.
Chatham , Ontario ,
26 November 1884; d. Alameda ,
California , 28 January 1977)
"Bassett Morgan" and Forrest J. Ackerman |
Bassett Morgan's first cover illustration, September 1927 |
She is best remembered as a
contributor to Weird Tales, in whose
pages she published thirteen stories, between 1926 and 1936, under the pen-name
“Bassett Morgan,” which was made up of her father’s middle name combined with
her own married name. And though she
also contributed to Ghost Stories,
most of her writing appeared outside the weird-fiction field in periodicals
ranging from The Royal Magazine, Cassell’s Magazine, The Smart Set, Argosy, All-Story, Munsey’s Magazine, Sea
Stories, Boy’s Life, Woman’s Journal, Top Notch, and Black Mask,
among many others. She also published
three novels, two under her real name and the third under her pseudonym.
The 1928 New York edition of Morgan's first book |
Salvage All (New York: Thomas Crowell,
1928; London: Grant Richards, 1928), as by Grace Jones Morgan, concerns a young
street waif at a British Columbia
seaport, and the men who seek to aid or abuse her. Tents
of Shem (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1930), also published
as by Grace Jones Morgan, is a complicated story of a reckless young woman,
born of an old Irish family and a San Francisco dancing girl with lax morals,
who could not escape her heritage. The
Golden Rupee (London: John Long, 1935), as by Bassett Morgan, is a South Sea
adventure of young Captain Paradise, who murders a leper and takes the man’s
treasure, including an intricately beautiful model of a ship called the “Golden
Rupee.” Captain Paradise has a vessel
built to this design, but he is fated never to sail in it, as he is killed by a
rival the night before his wedding, and his rival takes the ship. However, the
ghost of Captain Paradise still rules over the lives of those who had known him,
with tragic results.
In 1974,
under her full name Grace Jones Morgan she introduced and self-published an
edition limited to one hundred numbered copies of her father’s autobiography, The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones. This gives some accounts of his amateur
archeological work, including his finds of Indian artifacts and of a mastodon.
NB: An earlier
version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Lost and Forgotten
Writers” in All Hallows no. 42
(October 2006).
Morgan's second and last cover illustration , January 1935 |
A Bibliography of Bassett Morgan's weird fiction:
Bimini
Weird Tales,
January 1929
Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 10 (1949)
Black Bagheela
Weird Tales,
January 1935
The Demon Doom of N’Yeng Sen
Weird Tales,
August 1929
The Devils of Po Sung
Weird Tales,
December 1927
T. Everett
Harré, ed. Beware After Dark! (1929)
Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. By Daylight Only (1929)
Weird Tales,
March 1939
Kurt Singer, ed. Satanic
Omnibus (1973)
Kurt Singer, ed. Shriek
(1974)
Gray Ghouls
Weird Tales,
July 1927
Weird Tales, September
1939
Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 15 (1951)
The Head
Weird Tales,
February 1927
The Island of Doom
Weird Tales,
March 1932
Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Grim Death (1932)
Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Not at Night (Arrow, 1960)
Laocoon
Weird Tales,
July 1926
Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. You'll Need a Night Light (1927)
Herbert Asbury, ed. Not
at Night! (1928)
Weird Tales, December
1937
Hugh Lamb, ed. Star
Book of Horror No. 2 (1976)
Midas
Weird Tales,
November 1936
The Punishment of Barney
Muldoon
Ghost Stories, October
1929
Mike Ashley, ed. Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades (2000)
Mike Ashley, ed. Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades (2000)
Rats at the Silver Cheese
Oriental Stories, Autumn 1931
The Skeleton under the Lamp
Weird Tales,
May 1928
Tiger
Strange Stories, March 1932
Strange Stories, March 1932
Startling Mystery
Stories, Spring 1969
Tiger Dust
Weird Tales,
April 1933
Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Keep on the Light (1933)
Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 12 (1950)
Weird Tales, January
1954
Short Stories,
Feb. 1959
The Vengeance of Ti Fong
Weird Tales,
December 1934
The Wolf Woman
Weird Tales, September 1927
Robert Weinberg, ed. The
Eighth Green Man and Other
Strange Folk (1989)
Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dzemianowicz, Martin H.
Greenberg,
eds. Weird Vampire
Tales (1992)
Your list does not include Tiger published in Strange Tales, March 1932, and in Strange tales reprint #4 by Wildside Press.
ReplyDeleteUpdated. Thanks!
DeleteWould it be possible to learn where your photo of Grace Jones Morgan is from, and how we might go about getting permission to use it in our database of early Canadian women writers? Karyn Huenemann (ceww.wordpress.com)
ReplyDeleteHi: It's a cropped version from some collection of Forrest J. Ackerman's personal photographs, called (I think) Famous Forry Fotos, or Famous Forrie Fotos. Your website looks like a good idea, but while I find that there is supposed to be a completed entry for Grace Jones Morgan, I can't access any entry itself, nor any other "completed entry".
DeleteThanks for this information. Sadly, we can therefore not use the image, as it is from a recently published book. We have to be more careful about these things that some sites...
DeleteThe entry for Grace Jones Morgan isn't up in the new website (it isn't itself up yet), which is a major digital humanities project run out of the University of Alberta (http://www.cwrc.ca/en/). The old site, at SFU, is here: http://content.lib.sfu.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/ceww/id/103/rec/2
The other link was to the blog I maintain in the interim, while we complete our research and coding of the new, expanded entries.
Here is a link to a mock-up of what our new entries will look like (more or less): https://cewwmockup.wordpress.com/sara-jeannette-duncan/
this perharps too
ReplyDeletehttps://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?387519
Updated. Thanks! Doug
Delete