Basil Wells

Born in Pennsylvania in 1912, Basil Eugene Wells was an American writer whose first published story, "Rebirth of Man," appeared in Super Science Stories in 1940. He went on to write across several popular genres, including science fiction, fantasy, westerns, and detective fiction, sometimes using the name Gene Ellerman.

Wells became especially associated with pulp and magazine fiction, contributing often to venues such as Planet Stories. His shorter work was later gathered in collections including Planets of Adventure and Doorways to Space, and reference sources on speculative fiction continue to note him as a distinctive voice of mid-century magazine storytelling.

He died in 2003. While some online pages about him are brief, they consistently show a writer with a long publishing life and a knack for offbeat, imaginative tales that still attract readers of classic genre fiction.