author
Arthur B. Waltermire
1888–1938
A musician and teacher as well as a writer, he left behind a small but memorable piece of weird fiction. His best-known story, The Doors of Death, blends eerie suspense with a calm, thoughtful interest in mortality and fear.
1 Audiobook
The Doors of Death
by Arthur B. Waltermire
About the author
Born in Findlay, Ohio, on September 10, 1888, Arthur Beecher Waltermire was an American musician, teacher, and author. Reliable library and public-domain sources agree on those basic facts, and they also place his death on July 30, 1938.
Waltermire is remembered today chiefly for The Doors of Death, a story published in Weird Tales and later preserved by Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, and Wikisource. Although his surviving body of fiction appears to be small, that story has lasted because it pairs classic pulp-era unease with a more reflective mood than its title first suggests.
The available record on his life is fairly limited, so it is safest to picture him as a writer whose reputation rests on one striking work rather than a large bibliography. Even so, that single story has been enough to keep his name in circulation among readers of early fantasy and weird fiction.