Jack Snow
John Frederick "Jack" Snow (August 15, 1907 – July 13, 1956), born Piqua, Ohio was an American radio writer, writer of ghost stories, and scholar, primarily of the works of L. Frank Baum. When Baum died in 1919, the twelve-year-old Snow offered to
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John Frederick "Jack" Snow (August 15, 1907 – July 13, 1956), born Piqua, Ohio was an American radio writer, writer of ghost stories, and scholar, primarily of the works of L. Frank Baum. When Baum died in 1919, the twelve-year-old Snow offered to be the next Royal Historian of Oz but was politely turned down by a staffer at Baum's publisher, Reilly & Lee. Snow eventually wrote two Oz books: The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) and The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949), as well as Who's Who in Oz (1954), a thorough guide to the Oz characters, all of which Reilly & Lee published.
In his second year in high school, the precocious Snow created the first radio review column in American journalism, in The Cincinnati Enquirer. After graduation, Snow pursued a career in print journalism and primarily in radio, with periods in teachers college and the U. S. Army. He named the Ohio radio station WING and spent seven years with the National Broadcasting Company in New York. In 1944, he attempted to get NBC to produce a radio series based on the stories of fellow Weird Tales author Ray Bradbury.
Snow published five stories in Weird Tales over the space of two decades: "Night Wings,"(Sept 1927); "Poison," (Dec 1928); "Second Childhood," (Mar 1945); "Seed," (Jan 1946); and "Midnight," (May 1946). These were all included in Dark Music and Other Spectral Tales(1947) with the exception of "Second Childhood". A full description of each tale in the collection appears in the entry on Snow in E.F. Bleiler's Guide to Supernatural Fiction Snow also published several letters in the letters column of Weird Tales over the years. "Seed" has also been reprinted in Marvin Kaye's 1988 anthology Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies".
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