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Leigh Brackett


(Leigh Douglass Brackett Hamilton)
USA flag (1915 - 1978)
Wife of Edmond Hamilton

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury.

In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963).

Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio.

Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.
 

Genres: Science Fiction, Western, Mystery
 
Series
Eric John Stark
   1. The Secret of Sinharat (1964)
   2. People of the Talisman (1964)
   3. The Ginger Star (1974)
   4. The Hounds of Skaith (1974)
   5. The Reavers of Skaith (1976)
   6. Outlaw of Mars (1982)
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Novels
   No Good From a Corpse (1943)
   Stranger at Home (1947) (with George Sanders (Craig Rice))
   Shadow over Mars (1951)
     aka Nemesis From Terra
   The Starmen (1952)
     aka The Galactic Breed / Starmen of Llyrids
   The Sword of Rhiannon (1953)
   The Big Jump (1955)
   The Long Tomorrow (1955)
   The Tiger Among Us (1957)
     aka Fear No Evil / 13 West Street
   An Eye for an Eye (1958)
   Rio Bravo (1959)
   Alpha Centauri - or Die! (1963)
   Follow the Free Wind (1963)
   The Coming of the Terrans (1967)
   Silent Partner (1969)
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Collections
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Novellas and Short Stories
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Anthologies edited
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Series contributed to
Star Wars
   The Empire Strikes Back: A Storybook (1980) (with others)
   The Empire Strikes Back Script (1999) (with Lawrence Kasdan)
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Anthologies containing stories by Leigh Brackett
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The Last Dangerous Visions (2024)
(Dangerous Visions, book 3)
edited by
Harlan Ellison
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Black Cat Weekly #82 (2023)
(Black Cat Weekly, book 82)
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Sense of Wonder (2023)
A Century of Science Fiction
edited by
Leigh Ronald Grossman

More anthologies 


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