Science fiction and fantasy writer Henry Hasse (died 1977) would have celebrated his one hundredth birthday today. Henry who? you ask.
Hasse published over forty science fiction stories in his lifetime, beginning with The End of Time, a a tale he wrote with A. Fedor in the November 1933 issue of Wonder Tales. Hasse's first solo story was the classic He Who Shrank (Amazing Stories, August 1936, reprinted both in Healy and McComas's Adventures in Time and Space and in Isaac Asimov's Before the Golden Age).
Prehaps Hasse's greatest claim to fame was that he co-wrote Ray Bradbury's first published story (Pendulum, Super Science Stories, November 1941). Hasse collaborated on two additional stories with Bradbury in the 1940s. Other he collaboratored with were Emil Petaja and Albert de Pina. His last story was published in 1975 in Stuart David Schiff's small-press magazine Whispers.
Hasse's work appeared mostly in semi-professional and/or low-paying (sometimes no-paying) magazines. Little has been reprinted. Henry Hasse was one of many toilers in a field of literature that offered few rewards -- writers who produced a few good and many uneven stories and whose work helped keep a genre alive.
From the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories, Project Gutenberg has picked up One Purple Hope!, which you can read at the link.
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1608106&pageno=1
On your one hundredth birthday, Mr. Hasse, I salute you. You may be an often-overlooked writer but you are not yet forgotten.
Very depressing, Jerry. But happy you remember him.
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