Sam Merwin

Born in 1910, Sam Merwin Jr. was an American writer and editor who became an important behind-the-scenes force in science fiction. He began publishing science-fiction stories in 1939, and he also wrote detective fiction and later worked in Hollywood.

Merwin is especially remembered for editing Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories in the 1940s. Reference sources credit him with moving those magazines away from a more juvenile style and helping make them stronger, more ambitious pulp science-fiction publications.

As a novelist, he is often associated with The House of Many Worlds and Three Faces of Time, stories built around time-travel and parallel-world ideas. Though he may be better known today as an editor than as a fiction writer, his career shows how much one energetic magazine editor could influence the shape of the genre. He died in 1996.