L
Lester del Rey
Lester del Rey was born Leonard Knapp in Saratoga, Minnesota, the son of poor sharecroppers of partly Spanish ancestry. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he managed to complete high school and two years at George Washington University before dropping out for economic reasons. He started publishing stories in pulp magazines in the late 1930s. He was closely associated Astounding Science Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. In 1935, his first wife was killed in a car ac...