author
John L. (John Leslie) Chapman
b. 1920
A mid-20th-century science fiction writer with a knack for fast, imaginative adventure, this American author also wrote nonfiction on rockets and missiles. His work appeared in pulp-era magazines and has remained accessible through public-domain editions.
1 Audiobook
In the Earth's Shadow
by John L. (John Leslie) Chapman
About the author
Born in 1920, John L. Chapman wrote science fiction during the pulp and digest-magazine era, publishing stories such as Into the Sun and In the Earth's Shadow. Public-domain listings and bibliographic sources identify him as John Leslie Chapman, and library records connect him with the 1960 nonfiction book Atlas: The Story of a Missile.
Available sources suggest he was part of the American science fiction scene around the 1940s and 1950s, writing the kind of brisk, idea-driven adventures that fit the magazines of the time. Some biographical details beyond his birth year are inconsistent or lightly documented in the sources I could confirm, so this overview stays close to the published record.
Today, Chapman is best remembered through surviving magazine fiction and reprints preserved by projects such as Project Gutenberg and Wikisource, which make a small but interesting slice of his work easy for modern readers to discover.