Ray Cummings

Born Raymond King Cummings in New York City on August 30, 1887, he became one of the best-known American science fiction writers of the pulp-magazine age. Before his fiction career took off, he worked for Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer, an experience that likely fed his lifelong interest in invention, scale, and speculative science.

He began publishing fiction in the 1910s and went on to write hundreds of stories and novels, with work appearing in magazines such as Argosy, Amazing Stories, and other major pulps. He is especially remembered for adventures like The Girl in the Golden Atom and The Man Who Mastered Time, which mixed romance, danger, and bold scientific ideas in a way that felt vivid and accessible to general readers.

Cummings also wrote comic-book scripts and used several pen names during his long career. He died in Mount Vernon, New York, on January 23, 1957, but his reputation has lasted as one of the energetic early builders of modern science fiction.