Georgia Wood Pangborn

Georgia Wood Pangborn (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 ... She is better considered as something of an end-product, one of the last of the supernaturalists whose artistic & commercial impetus, whose inspirations & restraints, grew out of America's great flourishing of magazine literature, a flourishing that was ending as the pulps moved into the vacuum. ... [This era was followed by] the flowering of "psychological" ghost stories in the aftermath of Victorian chain-rattlers & Edwardian embodiments of pure evil. Ellen Glasgow is the purest example of the American portion, her tales collected as The Shadowy Third (1923). Georgia Wood Pangborn was part of this small, intense though brief, & refined period of supernatural writings that were first remarked upon & defined as a newly rising phenomenon by Olivia Howard Dunbar in the June 1, 1905 issue of the Dial. Given that Mrs. Pangborn's short work was appearing by 1903, while Miss Glasgow's perfected examples occurred mostly about 1920, it must therefore be that Mrs. Pangborn helped originate & develop the form & nature of this inward-looking type of uncanny fiction, 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 was mother of noted SF writer Edgar Pangborn, and of Mary Pangborn, 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)
• "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 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)

References

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