The Pornographer (And once or twice SF Writer...)

[lsanderson]

My Dad, the Pornographer
By CHRIS OFFUTT
FEB. 5, 2015

My father, Andrew Jefferson Offutt V, grew up in a log cabin in Taylorsville, Ky. The house had 12-inch-thick walls with gun ports to defend against attackers: first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method — find it and land on it — using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. In this fashion, he eventually wrote and published more than 400 books. Two were science fiction and 24 were fantasy, written under his own name; the rest were pornography, using 17 pseudonyms. Moar

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you for that. I enormously enjoyed hanging out with... or rather _in the vicinity of_ Andy on the rare occasions we both attended MidWestern Conventions back in the '60s, '70s, & early '80s, but I knew nothing about his porno -- which I'd have understood (as I did Agberg's) as a way of earning money, but would have been completely bewildered about as a sexulal obsession. It simply didn't come up either in his public conversation during those interactions, in his fanzine activity, or in our few exchanges of letters.

I am, by the way, _extremely_ Impressed by his son's perceptivity and writing skills. This seems to be one case where "it skips a generation" does not apply. (Mind you, I'm not entirely convinced that Chris has it Absollutely Right in all respects, but that (Sturgeon's Law, to be pedantic) is par for the course.)

[kaffy_r]

Fascinating, sad and perceptive. Thanks for the link.

[arkuat]

Thanks for posting this.

ETA: Of course A. J. Offutt caught my eye with his science fiction. And of course I'm not surprised to learn that he also went after the money with porn, as a lot of writers in the 20th c. did. I read porn myself. But before I started reading Chris's memoir, Offutt was just another sf writer to me. I've got a little bit of a Kentucky background myself, and now Offutt's making me re-examine my entire life, at least to the extent of doing kind favors to those who will have to declutter my (much less interesting) hoardage after I die.