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Frederik Pohl
b. 1919
Frederik Pohl was born in Manhattan on November 26, 1919. His father was a machinist whose work took him to the Panama Canal shortly after his son's birth, and the family lived a peripatetic life in Texas, New Mexico, and California before settling down in Brooklyn several years later. Pohl was sickly as a child and did not enter grade school until the age of eight. In 1930 he came across a copy of the pulp magazine Science Wonder Quarterly at a newsstand and became hooked for life on science fiction.
A high school dropout at seventeen, Pohl became an active member of the Brooklyn Science Fiction League and later the Futurians, an influential club of New York science fiction fans that would number among its ranks Damon Knight, James Blish, Isaac Asimov, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and other writers and critics who shaped the course of science fiction in the postwar years. The Futurians looked upon their interest in science fiction not only as a hobby but as an outgrowth of their social and political philosophies, and it was during his affiliation with them that Pohl refined his belief in science fiction as a tool for reflecting on culture. When he became editor of the low-budget magazines Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories in 1940, Pohl enlisted his colleagues' help to fill issues with fiction and artwork.
Although Pohl wrote fiction under a variety of pseudonyms used by the Futurians, it was not until the 1950s, when he had given up working as a literary agent for science fiction writers, that he began writing under his own name. Much of his early fiction was written in collaboration with Cyril M. Korbluth, including his first novel The Space Merchants (1953), a dystopia about a near-future America governed by advertising companies that displayed his bent for social satire and is renowned as one of the most prescient, if cynical, novels of modern science fiction. Other collaborators during these years included Lester del Rey, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, and his third wife, Judith Merril.

 
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