author
William Dudley Pelley
1890–1965
A prolific writer who moved from journalism and Hollywood screenwriting into mystical publishing and extremist politics, he became one of the most notorious fringe figures of interwar America. His career spans popular fiction, spiritualist writing, and the founding of the antisemitic Silver Legion.
1 Audiobook
The fog : A novel
by William Dudley Pelley
About the author
Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1890, William Dudley Pelley worked as a journalist before gaining notice as a fiction writer and screenwriter. He won O. Henry Awards for short fiction and spent part of the 1920s in Hollywood, where he wrote for silent films as well as magazines and newspapers.
A claimed mystical experience in the late 1920s pushed his work in a different direction. Pelley began publishing spiritual and occult material, especially after his essay Seven Minutes in Eternity attracted wide attention. Over time, his religious and mystical interests blended with increasingly authoritarian and conspiratorial political ideas.
He is now remembered chiefly for founding the Silver Legion, or Silver Shirts, a fascist movement that promoted antisemitism and admiration for Hitler in the 1930s. After World War II, his influence faded, though he continued writing and publishing until his death in Indiana in 1965.