Green Peyton

Born in New Castle, Delaware, on December 23, 1907, Green Peyton Wertenbaker wrote some of the earliest memorable stories of American magazine science fiction. His first published story, "The Man from the Atom," appeared when he was still a teenager, and later work such as The Coming of the Ice and The Chamber of Life helped establish him as an early voice in the field.

He did not stay only in pulp fiction. Writing often as Green Peyton, he published regional novels including Black Cabin and Rain on the Mountain, served on the editorial board of Fortune, and later became a contributing editor at Time. During World War II he served in the Pacific as an air combat intelligence officer aboard the USS Suwanee, experiences that fed into his 1945 book 5,000 Miles Toward Tokyo.

In the 1950s and 1960s, his career turned toward aerospace and science writing. He assisted with work on the possibility of life on Mars, wrote scripts for the television series Doctors in Space, joined NASA as a speechwriter, and later became chief historian of the Aerospace Medical Division. He died in San Antonio, Texas, on July 26, 1968.