Roger Sherman Hoar

Roger Sherman Hoar

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, for the state of Massachusetts.[1] He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of "Ralph Milne Farley."

Family

The Harvard-educated Hoar was the product of a New England family—the son of Sherman Hoar, grandson of former US Attorney General Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, great-grandson of Samuel Hoar, and great-great grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Education and career

Born in Waltham, Massachusetts, Hoar received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1909 and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1911.[2] During World War I, he served in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps.[3] Hoar was a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general. He was a member of the Marquette University faculty in the graduate school of engineering. He also served as attorney of Bucyrus Erie Company of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[4]

Politician

Hoar served in the Massachusetts State Senate in 1911[5] and campaigned for women suffrage.[6] Hoar was also an organizer and major force behind the enactment of the Employee Unemployment Benefits Act, served on the Commission to Compile Information & Data, 1917, taught mathematics and engineering, patented a system for aiming large guns by the stars, and authored landmark works on constitutional and patent law.

Writer

Under the pseudonym Ralph Milne Farley, Hoar wrote a considerable amount of pulp-magazine science fiction during the period between the world wars, appearing in such publications as Argosy All-Story Weekly, Weird Tales, True Gang Life, and Amazing Stories, as well as occasional essays for The American Mercury, Scientific American, and science fiction fanzines. His works include The Radio Man and its numerous sequels, chiefly interplanetary and inner-world adventure yarns in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with whom he was friends; Hoar also wrote a number of archetypal time-travel-paradox tales, collected in book form as The Omnibus of Time, and "The House of Ecstasy," told in the second-person and frequently reprinted since its initial appearance in Weird Tales (April 1938 issue).

Upon relocating to the Midwest, where he worked as a corporate attorney for the firm of Bucyrus-Erie, Hoar joined the Milwaukee Fictioneers, whose members included Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert Bloch, and Raymond A. Palmer. When Chicago-based Ziff-Davis Publishing Company bought the ailing Amazing Stories in 1938, Hoar was offered, but declined, the magazine's editorship and recommended Palmer, who held the position through the 1940s.

Books

As Roger Sherman Hoar

As Ralph Milne Farley

Notes

  1. ↑ Data base
  2. ↑ 'Harvard University Directory,' Harvard University: 1914, Biographical Sketch of Roger Sherman Hoar, pg. 386
  3. ↑ 'Sherman Genealogy Including Families of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk England,' Thomas Townsend Sherman: T.A. Wright: 1920, Biographical Sketch of Roger Sherman Hoar, pg. 387
  4. ↑ 'Subversive Activities Against Government-Two Conflict Theories', Roger Sherman Hoar, Marquette Law Review, Vol. 27, Issue 2, February 1943, pg. 72
  5. ↑ 'A Manual for the use of the Massachusetts General Court 1911,' Wright and Potter Printng Company State Printers, Boston, Massachusetts: 1911, Arrangement of the Senate, pg. 431
  6. ↑ 'The Busiest Man of His Age In The World-Roger Sherman Hoar, Massachusetts Young Legislator Has Enough Jobs For a Dozen Men-He is an Enthusiastic Suffragist Champion and Works Hard for Interests of that Cause,' New York Times, November 20, 1910

External links

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