Lester del Rey

The NYPR Archive Collections | Jan 1, 2000

Matthew Paris interviews Lester del Rey.

Paris writes:

One of the great science fiction writers of the 20th century Lester lived on the Upper West Side with his wife Judy Ann Del Rey, a honcho in paperback publishing. They were both physically very diminutive. Lester had a rich elegaic quality about him that one can feel in his many augustly brilliant stories.

One warmed up to Lester because one felt he had a sense of loss at the margins that he had made excellent use of as a prose writer. He seemed vulnerable. One should understand that if almost nobody made any money as a writer in America in this or any other time science fiction had an unstated deal with their writers that if they were paid almost nothing, they could write as they pleased. It attracted a lot of readers to science fiction.

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