Review: Charles Fort's Underrated Influence

Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the “inspired clown” (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them.

Fort’s influence after he died isn’t as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literature, where his fans stretched from the modernist avant garde to the science fiction pulps.

Fort had a political legacy too, if not in the mainstream left-right spectrum then on the outer edges of our ideological maps, where cartographers have scrawled “here there be dragons.” A Fortean Society was formed near the end of Fort’s life, and though Fort was wary of the group (he declared it a collection of “freaks”), its leader—the novelist and screenwriter Tiffany Thayer—kept it alive for decades. And while its members ranged from socialists to fascists, most had the anti-authoritarian impulses you’d expect from a group that touted its skepticism about everything. Thayer himself was a fierce pacifist (and prolific conspiracy theorist) who filled the Fortean publication Doubt with attacks on both World War II and the Cold War.

Buhs’ engaging study displays the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians, and it shows the milieu’s less liberty-friendly sides as well. And it doesn’t neglect the figures who rebuffed the Fortean Society. Thayer kept trying to get H.L. Mencken to join, for example, but Mencken considered Fort’s work “highfalutin balderdash”—though he gave the man credit for managing “to make even the most extravagant nonsense palatable.”

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