Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 - June 8, 1975) was a pen name used by William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, primarily science fiction. He wrote and published almost 1500 short stories and essays, 14 film scripts, and hundreds of radio and television plays. Leinster Jenkins, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins, was born in Norfolk, Virginia. His father was a bookkeeper. Despite the fact that both parents were born in Virginia, the family resided in Manhattan in 1910, according to the Federal Census. Despite being a high school dropout, he began working as a freelance writer before World War I. His debut tale, "The Foreigner," appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set, two months before his twentieth birthday. Leinster contributed 10 more tales in the magazine over the next three years; in a September 2022 interview, Leinster's daughter noted that Mencken advocated using a pseudonym for non-Smart Set work. Leinster served in the United States Army and the Committee of Public Information during World War I (1917-1918). His writing began to appear in pulp magazines such as Argosy, Snappy Stories, and Breezy Stories during and after the war. He continued to be published in Argosy into the 1950s.
