author
W. Elwyn (Waldo Elwyn) Backus
1892–1979
A pulp-era writer with a taste for eerie ideas and early science fiction, he published a small but memorable body of work in classic magazines. His fiction has a curious, old-school sense of wonder that still appeals to readers of weird and speculative tales.
1 Audiobook
The waning of a world
by W. Elwyn (Waldo Elwyn) Backus
About the author
Born in Newport, Kentucky, in 1892, Waldo Elwyn Backus wrote under the name W. Elwyn Backus. Reference sources for his work list him as an American author, and surviving bibliographic records connect him especially with fantastic and science-fiction stories from the early pulp-magazine era.
Backus is best remembered for fiction published in Weird Tales, where he contributed a handful of stories, and for The Waning of a World, a longer science-fiction adventure that later entered the public domain and remains the work most often associated with his name. Modern catalog and public-domain listings show that his writing still circulates through archival and volunteer reading projects, helping new readers discover him.
He died in 1979. No clear, reliable portrait image was available from the pages I checked, so I have left the profile image blank rather than guess.