Edgar Pangborn

Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) was an American writer regarded as a pioneer of humanist science fiction, an approach that influenced later writers including Ursula K. Le Guin and Peter S. Beagle. After early work in pulp fiction, he found his voice in the 1950s with novels centered on compassion and moral complexity rather than technological spectacle. His best-known novel, Davy (1964), is a picaresque, Hugo-nominated coming-of-age story set in a post-apocalyptic, theocratic New England, part of a loose sequence continued in The Company of Glory and other stories of a "darkening world." A Mirror for Observers (1954), narrated in part by a Martian living secretly among humans, won the International Fantasy Award. Pangborn also trained as a musician at Harvard and worked as a painter later in life. He received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award posthumously in 2003.