Norman L. Knight

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Norman Louis Knight (September 21, 1895 – April 19, 1972) was an American chemist and writer of fantasy and science fiction. He was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, into a family that ran a drugstore. He joined the U.S. Army in 1917 and served in France during World War I. After recovering from influenza, he did horseback message work with the Signal Corps. He later worked for the National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa.

Knight met his wife, Marie Sarah Yenn, while working there, and they had a daughter named Paula Marie. He wrote most of his stories for Astounding magazine from 1937 to 1942, including two serialized novellas. He briefly came out of retirement from 1965 to 1967 to co-write the novel A Torrent of Faces with James Blish; this became his best-known work and has been reprinted several times, including in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line. Parts of the novel appeared in Galaxy Magazine as The Shipwrecked Hotel in 1965 and were nominated for the Nebula Award in 1966.

Although he had some success in the early days of science fiction, Knight never became a major name and his work faded from memory. Still, peers praised him: Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett called his 1939 story Saurian Valedictory one of the great stories about alien minds, noting it vividly imagined a reptilian civilization before humans. He died in Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1972.