J. Stewart (John Stewart) Barney

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1867, John Stewart Barney built a varied career in New York as an architect and painter. He studied at Columbia University and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and worked in architectural partnerships including Barney and Chapman and Barney & Colt.

Alongside his design work, Barney also wrote. For readers of early science fiction and speculative fiction, he is remembered for L.P.M.: The End of the Great War, a novel that imagines future war on a large technological scale.

That combination of architect, artist, and author helps explain the flavor of his writing: it comes from someone used to thinking visually, structurally, and ambitiously. He died in New York in 1925.