author
Frank Orndorff
1885–1971
A little-known early pulp writer, this author left behind a striking mix of high-altitude science fiction and jungle adventure. His surviving work has the feel of a bygone magazine era, full of danger, imagination, and old-school thrills.
1 Audiobook
The terrors of the upper air
by Frank Orndorff
About the author
Born in Delavan, Illinois, in 1885, Frank Milliken Orndorff was an American writer whose published work appears to have been small in quantity but memorable in flavor. Bibliographic records connect him with the science-fiction story The Terrors of the Upper Air and the novel Kongo, the Gorilla-Man.
The Terrors of the Upper Air first appeared in Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1928 and later entered the public domain, helping introduce modern readers to Orndorff's adventurous, early-SF style. His 1945 novel Kongo, the Gorilla-Man points to a second side of his writing: fast-moving popular fiction shaped by the exotic adventure tales of its time.
Orndorff died in 1971. Although he is not a widely documented literary figure today, the work that remains suggests a writer drawn to peril, strange settings, and the kind of bold storytelling that defined much of early twentieth-century genre fiction.