Author Biography and Bibliography

(Joseph) Ward Moore was born in 1903, in Montreal, Canada, but grew up in Madison, New Jersey. He was removed from De Witt Clinton high school in NYC under threat of expulsion for "Red" ideas. He wrote from the age of 11; his first novel published in 1942. Worked on the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, circa 1937-1940. Lived in NYC, moved to California in 1929, and lived there on and off until his death in 1978. He had three children.

Moore was initially as well known for his works outside the sf field—like the picaresque Breathe the Air Again (1942)—as for those within. Although he contributed only infrequently to the field, each of his books became something of a classic. His first sf publication was Greener Than You Think (1947), a successful comic satire about a mutated form of grass which absorbs the entire world while governments dither. His second and most famous sf tale, Bring the Jubilee (1953), became the definitive alternate worlds novel in which the South wins the American Civil War.

Moore also wrote two of the most notable stories describing nuclear holocaust and its consequences, "Lot" (1953) and "Lot's Daughter" (1954), featuring a great motorized exodus from a doomed Los Angeles, seen through biblical parallelism as the city of Sodom. The hero jettisons his irredeemably suburban wife and his sons and goes on to make a new and incestuous life with his daughter in the mountains. The ironies attached to his monstrous survivalism are savage. The stories were used as an uncredited basis for the film Panic in Year Zero (1962), losing much of their power in the cleaning-up process.

Critical information adapted from material provided by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with special thanks to Barry N. Malzberg for additional background).