Wardon Allan Curtis

Wardon Allan Curtis (1867-1940) was born in New Mexico Territory and took his degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He wrote for the popular magazines of the 1890s and 1900s, where his taste ran to comedy, crime and the frankly weird, and later worked as a newspaperman on the staffs of the Chicago Daily News, the Boston Herald and the Manchester Union, with a spell as secretary of the New Hampshire Publicity Commission. He is remembered today chiefly for the 1899 story "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie," in which a human brain is grafted into a surviving elasmosaurus, and which is still reprinted in anthologies of early weird and science fiction. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire.