author
Florence McLandburgh
1850–1934
An Ohio-born writer of fiction and poetry, she is best remembered for "The Automaton-Ear," an imaginative 1873 story now often noted as an early work of science fiction by an American woman. She also published poetry under the pen name McLandburgh Wilson.
1 Audiobook
The Automaton Ear, and Other Sketches
by Florence McLandburgh
About the author
Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on April 22, 1850, she later lived in Chicago and built a career as a writer of fiction and poetry. Some of her work appeared under the name McLandburgh Wilson, and she was part of a literary family: her older brother John McLandburgh was also a writer.
Her best-known work is The Automaton Ear, and Other Sketches (1876). The title story, first published in 1873, imagines a device that can recover sounds from the past, and modern readers often single it out as a strikingly early example of speculative fiction.
She died in Akron, Ohio, on June 3, 1934. Though she is not as widely known today as some of her contemporaries, her work continues to attract readers interested in nineteenth-century fiction, poetry, and the early history of science fiction.