David H. Keller

David Henry Keller (December 23, 1880 – July 13, 1966) was an American writer who worked for pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century, in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He was the first psychiatrist to write for the genre, and was most often published as David H. Keller, MD, but also known by the pseudonyms Monk Smith, Matthew Smith, Amy Worth, Henry Cecil, Cecilia Henry, and Jacobus Hubelaire.

John Clute has written, "It is clear enough that Keller's conceptual inventiveness, and his cultural gloom, are worth more attention than they have received; it is also clear that he fatally scanted the actual craft of writing, and that therefore he is likely never to be fully appreciated."

Keller was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. He served as a neuropsychiatrist in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World Wars I and II, and was the Assistant Superintendent of the Louisiana State Mental Hospital at Pineville until Huey Long's reforms removed him from his position in 1928.

That same year, Keller would travel to New York City to meet with Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Amazing Stories, who had bought his first professionally published science fiction story, "The Revolt of the Pedestrians". Gernsback was impressed by Keller's quality of writing, unique insight, and ability to address sophisticated themes beyond the commonplace technological predictions or lurid alien encounters typically found in early pulp stories. He encouraged Keller's writing and would later call these distinctive short stories "Keller yarns".

In 1929, Gernsback founded the magazine Science Wonder Stories and not only published Keller's work in the first issue, but listed him as an Associate Science Editor. It was this issue of Science Wonder Stories that introduced the term "science fiction" to the world. This began an intense writing period for Keller, but he was unable to support his family solely on a writer's income and set up a small private psychiatric practice out of his home in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.

Keller became an early scholar of H.P. Lovecraft, publishing occasional works on Lovecraft from 1948 to 1965.Most notably he was the first to suggest, in 1948, the influential but erroneous idea that Lovecraft could have inherited syphilis from his parents. Lovecraft publisher Arkham House published many books in the fantasy and horror field including a small but steady number throughout the 1950s. Robert Weinberg has written that: "However, intense competition from the SF (science fiction) small presses as well as slow sales of certain titles put August Derleth in a precarious bind. Only a generous loan from Dr David H. Keller prevented Arkham from going bankrupt during a period of cash flow problems."

Robert Weinberg writes of Keller's book career: "Dr David H. Keller had been one of the most popular science fiction authors of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus it was not surprising that several small presses, composed mainly of fans who had begun reading science fiction during that time, chose a Keller book as their first publication. Unfortunately, Dr Keller was no longer a name that could sell books and the Avalon Publishing Company, New Era Publishers and NFFF all ceased publications after producing one book by Dr Keller.

Keller's work often expressed strong right-wing views (Everett F. Bleiler claims he was "an ultra-conservative ideologically"), especially hostility to feminists and African-Americans. Keller's 1928 story "The Menace" revolves about a series of black plots to take over the United States; it has been described by Bleiler as "racially bigotted". Keller has further been criticized for "his corrosive attitude toward both science and civilization," "anti-feminist, racist tendencies" and occasional "sexual sadism."

John Clute writes that Keller was "deeply involved in the last capacity in World War One and its consequences, his work focusing on shell shock; he was one of relatively few American sf writers to have anything like the direct experience of War That Will End War that marked so many British authors, a fact that may help explain his abiding cultural pessimism, often expressed in stories where a thin, almost literal veneer of civilization is peeled off to reveal the excrescence within."

Keller wrote a number of horror and fantasy stories, which some critics regard as superior to his SF work. Most notable is his 1932 horror tale "The Thing In The Cellar". Keller also created a series of fantasy stories called the Tales of Cornwall sequence, about the Hubelaire family; these were influenced by James Branch Cabell. Keller also wrote some fantasy work inspired by his interest in Freudian psychology, including "The Golden Bough" (1934) and The Eternal Conflict (1939 in French;1949 English).

John Clute describes Keller's early work: "The stories of Keller's early prime – with their heavily foregrounded concepts and Inventions and with their endemic indifference to plausible narrative follow-through – made him an ideal writer for Hugo Gernsback, who published most of his output during these years, as well as his first book, The Thought Projector (1929 chap), in the Science Fiction Series of pamphlets."

Examining a particularly famous story, Clute writes, "'The Revolt of the Pedestrians' may be the most remarkable of these, though certainly one of the strangest. It is one of the relatively few sf tales before around 1970 to treat the hypertrophy of automobile culture in the twentieth century as Dystopian; after centuries, 'automobilists' have become almost organically tied to their Pollution-emitting cars, have lost the use of their legs, and have made pedestrianism a fatal offense. After the leader of a band of pedestrians turns off all electricity, legless automobilists die helplessly in their millions; the description of the death of twenty million New Yorkers attempting to flee Manhattan is extremely vivid. In the end, two elite pedestrians meet and prepare to breed, far from any despicable City."

Bleiler described Keller as "a very poor technician" when it came to writing fiction. However, he also argued that Keller "occasionally wrote fable-like stories, detached from daily realities and surrogate science fiction realities, that were excellent". Bleiler also described "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" as "a powerful story, horrible at times, but imaginative and rigorous in logic". Despite being ignored in the US outside science-fiction and fantasy fandom, several French writers, including Régis Messac, praised Keller as a "major author".