Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968)

Clare Winger Harris, daughter of x and x, was born in freeport, IL on 18 Jan 1891. She died in October 1968 in Pasadena, CA. In 1912 she married Frank Clyde Harris with whom she had three sons: Clyde, Donald and Lynn.

Harris was an early science fiction writer whose short stories were published during the 1920s. She is credited as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. Her stories often dealt with characters on the "borders of humanity" such as cyborgs. Her stories often dealt with characters on the borders of humanity, such as cyborgs and also featured strong female characters. They have received positive critical response, including recognition of her pioneering role as a woman writer in a male-dominated field.

December 1926

The July 1926 issue of Weird Tales included a short story entitled “A Runaway World,” by Clare Winger Harris. Although the issue also contained a story by Elizabeth Adt Wenzler and earlier issues had also included supernatural tales written by women, Harris’s story was different because it was a tale of science fiction rather than the occult.

In December of that year, Hugo Gernsback ran a contest in his new science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, asking his readers to provide a story that explained the cover of that month’s issue.  The cover depicted several nearly naked figure on a cliff watching an ocean liner floating over a strange city. Gernsback was surprised to receive an entry from an author with a woman’s name.  Although her story, “The Fate of the Poseidonia” only took third prize in the contest, when Harris’s name appeared next to it in the June 1927 issue, hers was the only female name in the table of contents and was the first female name to have a story appear in Amazing Stories. In fact, in breaking the gender barrier, she caused Gernsback to write, “That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientification writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.”


Harris eventually published 11 short stories in pulp magazines, most of them in Amazing Stories (although she also published in other places such as Science Wonder Quarterly). In 1947 her short stories were collected under the title "Away from the Here and Now." Her stories have also been reprinted in anthologies such as "Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century" (with a critical essay)," Sci-Fi Womanthology," "Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935," and" Gosh Wow! Sense of Wonder Science Fiction." She wrote one novel, "Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece" (1923).

She also wrote one of the first attempts to classify science fiction when, in the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, she listed 16 basic science fiction themes, including, interplanetary space travel, adventures on other worlds and the creation of synthetic life.