Georgia Wood Pangborn

Georgia Wood Pangborn (b. Malone, New York, Aug. 29, 1872 - April 17, 1958) was a notable writer of supernatural fiction and poet -- "once regarded as an American Algernon Blackwood". Scholar Jessica Amanda Salmonson notes that:

It is difficult to fully evaluate & precisely place Mrs. Pangborn's position in the development of the American ghost story. On the one hand she was not an influence on the pulp authors of the generation that followed hers, for her stories became too difficult to obtain & were no longer widely known ... Mrs. Pangborn helped originate & develop the form & nature of this inward-looking type of uncanny fiction [ psychological ghost stories ], even while failing always to epitomize the type. An indirect influence on today's psychologically complex supernaturalists, through the line of [Oliver] Onions & Glasgow, can be inferred to Mrs. Pangborn. At all events, her position has to be placed higher than her later obscurity might at first indicate.

She graduated from Smith College, and was mother of noted SF writer Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976), and of Mary Pangborn (d.2003), also a writer of weird stories.

Names

• Georgia Wood (birthname)
• Georgia Wood Pangborn (married name; she was married to Harry Levi Pangborn)

Bibliography

first published works

• first novel: Roman Biznet (1902)
• first short story: "The Gray Collie" (Scribner's Magazine (July 1903))

Short fiction

• "Andy MacPherson's House" (Romance March 1920)
• "Bixby's Bridge" (Harper's March 1917)
• "Broken Glass" (Scribner's August 1911)
• "The Boulder" (Holland's Magazine December 1925) (non-supernatural)
• "Cara" (Harper's Monthly January 1914)
• "The Children of Mount Pyb" (Harper's 1919)
• "A Dispensation" (Everybody's September 1906; Interventions (1911))
• "Doubting Castle" (Bookman July 1906)
• "The Fourth Watch" (Bookman November 1905)
• "The Ghost Flower" (Bookman November 1908)
• "The Gray Collie" (Scribner's Magazine (July 1903); Interventions (1911))
• "The Haunted Coat" (Collier's November 10, 1906)
• "The Ice Storm" (Women's Home Companion March 1918)
• "The Intruder" (Harper's June 1907)
• "The North Wind" (Chicago Tribune literary supplement December 16, 1926)
• "The Rescue" (Woman's Home Companion March 1912)
• "The Ring of the Great Wish" (Forum May 1914)
• "The Substitute" (1914) (Harper's Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1914)
• "The Teacher"
• "The Twilight Gardener" (Touchstone June 1917)

Novels

• Roman Biznet (Houghton Mifflin, 1902) ("It flirts with supernatural ideas but is not occult.")

Collections

• Interventions (Scribner's, 1911) - includes "The Gray Collie", "A Dispensation"

Posthumous collections

• The Wind at Midnight (1999: Ash-Tree Press) (introduction by Jessica Amanda Salmonson)

Further reading

• Jessica Amanda Salmonson, "The Uncanny Stories of Georgia Wood Pangborn" (1999?) (visited 2010/12/22)
• New York State Literary Tree
• Literary Gothic
• "Edgar Pangborn", Wikipedia
• Edgar Pangborn papers, Boston University [from Edgar Pangborn to Mary Pangborn to Peter S. Beagle to Boston University]