William Tenn was the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

of Philip Klass (May 9, 1920 – February 7, 2010), a British-born American

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

author, notable for many stories with satirical elements.

Biography

Born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, Phillip Klass moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

with his parents before his second birthday and grew up in Brooklyn, the oldest of three children. After serving in the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

as a combat engineer in Europe, he held a job as a technical editor with an Air Force radar and radio laboratory and was employed by

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

. Phillip and Fruma Klass married in 1957, and they moved in 1966 to

State College, Pennsylvania State College is a home rule municipality in Centre County in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is a college town, dominated economically, culturally and demographically by the presence of the University Park campus of the Pennsylvania Sta ...

, where he taught English and comparative literature at Penn State University for 22 years. Students of his who would go on to professional careers as writers included ''

Rambo Rambo is a surname with Norwegian (Vestfold) and Swedish origins. It possibly originated with '' ramn'' + '' bo'', meaning "raven's nest". It has variants in French (''Rambeau'', ''Rambaut'', and ''Rimbaud'') and German (''Rambow''). It is now best ...

'' creator

David Morrell David Morrell (born April 24, 1943) is a Canadian-American novelist whose debut 1972 novel ''First Blood'', later adapted as the 1982 film of the same name, went on to spawn the successful ''Rambo'' franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. He h ...

, screenwriter Steven E. de Souza, technology writer

Steven Levy Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...

and crime novelist

Ray Ring Ray Ring is an American novelist and journalist. Ring has been based in the American West since the 1970s, with stints in Arizona, Colorado and Montana. Novels * Arizona Kiss' (Little, Brown, 1991) is a noir suspense/thriller about a cynical Ari ...

. Phil's wife, Fruma Klass (b. 1935), grew up in

and graduated from the

Bronx High School of Science The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Sp ...

and Brooklyn College to work as a lab technician, a medical editor and a Harper & Row copy editor. At Penn State, she was a writing instructor and a copy editor for the

Penn State University Press The Penn State University Press, also known as The Pennsylvania State University Press, was established in 1956 and is a non-profit publisher of scholarly books and journals. It is the independent publishing branch of the Pennsylvania State Un ...

. When Phil Klass retired, the couple moved to the

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

suburb of Mt. Lebanon in 1988, and she took a job as an editor with Black Box Corporation. That same year, her first short story, "Before the Rainbow," was published in the anthology ''Synergy 3''. In 1996, her second story, "After the Rainbow," won a Writers of the Future prize; the story was published in ''Writers of the Future, Vol. XII''. In 2004, she entered a worldwide essay competition, the Power of Purpose Awards, sponsored by the

John Templeton Foundation The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton, who became wealthy via a career as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious a ...

. Competing against 7,000 entrants from 97 countries, she won $25,000 for her essay, "Streets of Mud, Streets of Gold." Phil and Fruma Klass were members of the Pittsburgh Area Real Time Science Fiction Enthusiasts Consortium (PARSEC), and were frequent speakers at its local conference, Confluence. Phil Klass was a Guest of Honor at Noreascon 4, the 2004 World Science Fiction Convention. He was the Author Guest of Honor at Loscon 33 at the LAX Marriott in Los Angeles in 2006. He has published most of his fiction as William Tenn and much of his nonfiction as Phil (or Philip) Klass. He is sometimes confused with UFO debunker Philip J. Klass, who was born six months earlier and who died August 9, 2005. Klass was related to other writers, including his nieces, Perri Klass and Judy Klass, his nephew

David Klass David Klass is an American screenwriter and novelist. He has written more than 40 screenplays for Hollywood studios and published 14 young adult novels. His screenplays are primarily character-based thrillers for adults, while his novels ofte ...

, and his brother Morton Klass. He died on February 7, 2010, of congestive heart failure, and was survived by his wife Fruma, daughter Adina, and sister Frances Goldman-Levy.

Writing

Klass published academic articles, essays, two novels and more than 60 short stories. He began writing while working at Bell Labs, and his radar lab experience prompted his first story, "Alexander the Bait", about a radar beam aimed at the moon. It was published in '' Astounding Science Fiction'' (May 1946), and within months a Signal Corps lab bounced a radar beam off the moon, making his story obsolete. He commented, "It was a bad story, just good enough to be published. Others in the same magazine were much better, so I really worked hard on my second one. I did as well as I knew how." Some of the nonfiction articles in the trade periodical '' TWX Magazine'' have been attributed to Klass during his employment at Bell Labs, although most were published without by-lines. His second story, the widely reprinted "Child's Play" (1947), told of a lawyer who creates people with his Bild-A-Man kit, a Christmas gift intended for a child of the future. After publication in ''Astounding Science Fiction'' (May 1946), Tenn was soon hailed as the science fiction field's reigning humorist, and during the early 1950s, readers of ''

Galaxy Science Fiction ''Galaxy Science Fiction'' was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published in Boston from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break into the American market. World Editi ...

'' looked forward to issues featuring his satirical science fiction. Many stories followed, including " Venus and the Seven Sexes" (1951), "Down Among the Dead Men" (1954), " The Liberation of Earth", "

Time in Advance ''Time in Advance'' (no ISBN) is a collection of four noveletes by American science fiction writer William Tenn (a pseudonym of Philip Klass). The stories all originally appeared in a number of different publications between 1952 and 1957. ''Time ...

" (1956) and " On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" (1974). One of his non-fiction articles, "Mr. Eavesdropper," was later collected in ''Best Magazine Articles, 1968''. His essay and interview collection, ''Dancing Naked'', was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Book in 2004. He was given the Author Emeritus honor by the

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, doing business as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, commonly known as SFWA ( or ) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization of professional science fiction and fantasy writers. Whil ...

in 1999. ''

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' (SFE) is an English language reference work on science fiction, first published in 1979. It has won the Hugo, Locus and British SF Awards. Two print editions appeared in 1979 and 1993. A third, continu ...

'' ranked Tenn as "one of the genre's very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers of short fiction."Clute and Nicholls 1995, pp. 1209-1210.

Theodore Sturgeon Theodore Sturgeon (; born Edward Hamilton Waldo, February 26, 1918 – May 8, 1985) was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 sh ...

summed up Tenn's humorous viewpoint on life: Tenn wrote two novels, both published in 1968. ''Of Men and Monsters'' is an expansion of his story "The Men in the Walls", originally in ''

'' (October 1963). ''A Lamp for Medusa'' was published as a double novel with Dave Van Arnam's ''The Players of Hell''. This novella was an expansion of his story "Medusa Was a Lady!" from the October, 1951 issue of '' Fantastic Adventures''.

Theater

In 1978, the University Readers at Penn State University presented a dramatization, directed by Joseph Wigley, of four of Tenn's short stories under the title ''Four From Tenn''. The selected stories were "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway", "Bernie the Faust", "The Tenants", and "My Mother Was a Witch". Pittsburgh's Malacandra Productions staged a nine-character play adapted by John Regis from the classic Tenn science fiction short story, "Winthrop Was Stubborn". Directed by David Brody for the Three Rivers Arts Festival, this production ran from June 2 through June 17, 2006.

Works

*''The Evolution of William Tenn or Myself When Young'' (1939) although these stories first published in book form by the Pretentious Press in 1995 *'' Children of Wonder'' (anthology edited by William Tenn) (1953) *'' Of All Possible Worlds'' (1955) *'' The Human Angle'' (1956) *''

'' (1958) *''A Lamp for Medusa'' (novella published as a double with ''The Players of Hell'' by Dave Van Arnam) (1968) *'' Of Men and Monsters'' (1968) (novel) *''Once Against the Law'' (1968) (anthology of crime fiction edited by Tenn and

Donald E. Westlake Donald Edwin Westlake (July 12, 1933 – December 31, 2008) was an American writer, with more than a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into ...

) *''The Seven Sexes'' (1968) *''The Square Root of Man'' (1968) *''The Wooden Star'' (1968) * "

On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi! ''On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!'' is a 1974 science fiction novella, novelette by William Tenn. At an Interstellar Neozionist Congress convened on Venus, weirdly-looking aliens claim that they are Jews. This legal quagmire was ingeniously resolv ...

" (1974); published in several collections *'' Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume I '' (omnibus) (2000) *'' Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume II'' (omnibus) (2001) *''Dancing Naked, the Unexpurgated William Tenn'' (non-fiction omnibus) (2004) ugo Nominee, Best Related Book, 2005 ;Online
William Tenn: "Constantinople" (full text)

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20060622222312/http://www.templeton.org/powerofpurpose/winners/printer_klass.html "Streets of Mud, Streets of Gold," $25,000 award-winning essay by Fruma Klass (full text)
William Tenn: "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!" (full text)

References

Sources

* Clute, John and Peter Nicholls. ''

''. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993 (2nd edition 1995). . * Stephensen-Payne, Phil and Gordon Benson Jr. ''William Tenn, High Klass Talent: A Working Bibliography''. Galactic Central Publications, 1993. .

External links

Official website
*
William Tenn
at

, 3rd edition (draft)
Bibliography
* * *

*

by Bud Webster, at Galactic Central * {{DEFAULTSORT:Tenn, William 1920 births 2010 deaths 20th-century American novelists American humorists American male novelists American science fiction writers American speculative fiction critics Pennsylvania State University faculty Writers from Brooklyn People from Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania Science fiction critics Writers from Pittsburgh Jewish American writers Journalists from Pennsylvania 20th-century American male writers Novelists from New York (state) Novelists from Pennsylvania 20th-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers Brooklyn College alumni United States Army personnel of World War II United States Army soldiers 20th-century pseudonymous writers 21st-century American Jews British emigrants to the United States