Richard S. Shaver

Born in Pennsylvania in 1907, Richard S. Shaver was an American writer and artist who became famous—sometimes notoriously so—for stories published in Amazing Stories during the 1940s. His breakthrough piece, I Remember Lemuria, appeared in 1945 and helped launch the sensational run of narratives later grouped together as the “Shaver Mystery.”

Those stories were presented in a way that blurred fiction, fantasy, and claimed personal revelation, which made Shaver a striking and divisive figure in pulp science fiction. Reference works also note that he had worked as a welder before turning to writing, and that he later continued his creative life as an artist as well as an author.

Shaver died in 1975. Today he is remembered less as a conventional science fiction writer than as one of the genre’s most unusual fringe figures: a storyteller whose bizarre underground myths, magazine fame, and outsider imagination still attract curious readers.