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| Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore |
Kuttner got his start in Weird Tales, his first story being "The Graveyard Rats", a grisly little piece. Other stories for WT followed, and soon he was branching out into science fiction and the shudder pulps. Legend has it that he started using pseudonyms after writing stories that appeared in the first two issues of Marvel Science Stories, stories that almost got the magazine shut down for pornography. Supposedly no editor would buy stories with Kuttner's byline for a while. Mike Resnick reports in his introduction to Girls for the Slime God (in which the above mentioned stories are reprinted) that in a late 1940s poll of sf readers, two of Kuttner's pen names came in higher than his real name. Those pen names were Lawrence O'Donnell and Lewis Padgett. Not surprising since his best regarded stories are under those names.
Kuttner's best work was done in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore. The story is that Kuttner wrote her a fan letter, not realizing that "C. L." stood for "Catherine Lucille."
Kuttner wrote in a wide variety of genres, including sword and sorcery. His tales of Elak of Atlantis (reviewed here, here, here, and here) as well as his two stories of Prince Raynor (reviewed here and here) helped fill the gap left by Robert E. Howard's death.
