Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

Born in Dallas on December 31, 1873, Eugene Percy Lyle Jr. grew up in Missouri, studied for two years at the University of Michigan, and began his career on the editorial staff of the Kansas City Times in the 1890s. He later worked in magazine journalism and fiction, building a career that crossed from newspapers into novels and screenwriting.

Lyle is remembered for books including The Missourian and The Lone Star, and for shorter fiction and articles published in popular magazines. Reference sources also note his interest in speculative and adventure writing; the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, for example, highlights his 1918 story The Great War of 1938 for how strikingly it tried to imagine a future global conflict.

Archival records describe him as both a journalist and a pulp-fiction writer, and film databases credit him on several silent-era productions. He spent his later years in California and died in the early 1960s. Some reference sources disagree on whether he died in 1961 or 1962, so that detail is best treated with caution.