We like Van Tassel Sutphen's work a lot -- open up and read a bit to see why; he's an enormously lucid and engaging writer -- but, try as we might, we've had a hard time finding much out about him. Oh, there are a few lines in the Science Fiction encyclopedia to the effect that he was an American writer who lived from 1861 to 1945; that he wrote a bunch of golf stories and a terse description of his 1906 postholocaust novel, The Doomsman. (Yes, 1906 -- bet you thought all this end-of-the-world thinking came out of the inventionn of the A Bomb, but no, Sutphen just barely lived to see that.) The Tuck encyclopedia adds his place of birth (Philadelphia) and lists a bunch of indivivual stories. But we'd love to know more and can't imagine how we'd learn it. Sigh. At least the work's still available to read: enjoy it; he really was a fine writer.

Author Biography

William Gilbert van Tassel Sutphen (1861-1945) was an American playwright, librettist, novelist and editor, an authority and author of publications on golf and eventually, an Episcopalian minister. Sutphen was born in Philadelphia. His parents were the Rev. Morris Crater Sutphen and Eleanor (Brush) Sutphen. He went to Princeton University and graduated in 1882. Sutphen wrote several novels, the most famous of which was The Doomsman, a science fiction novel in the post-apocalyptic subgenre. In his own time, Sutphen was probably more famous as an authority on golf than for his novels. He was the first editor of Golf magazine, published by Harper Brothers. He also coined the term "the 19th hole." He gave the library at Princeton a collection of 75 books about golf. Sutphen worked for many years as a reader and editor, for the publishers Harper Brothers, working on novels by Theodore Dreiser among others. At some point he became a brother-in-law of (the second) Joseph Harper. As a leading figure at Harpers, Sutphen attended Mark Twain's 70th birthday celebrations in New York.