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John W. Campbell

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About John W. Campbell

John Wood Campbell, Jr. (June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) was an important science fiction editor and writer. As a writer he was first influential under his own name as a writer of super-science space opera and then under the name Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym he used for moodier, less pulpish stories. However, Campbell's primary influence on the genre was as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a post that he held from late 1937 until his death. In that role he is generally credited with helping to create the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, which is often held to have started with the July 1939 issue of Astounding. Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely." At the time of his sudden and unexpected death after 34 years at the helm of Astounding, however, his quirky personality and occasionally eccentric editorial demands had alienated a number of his most illustrious writers such as Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein to the point that they no longer submitted works to him.

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