Clifford Ball

As he put it in a 1936 fan letter, "I have been a constant reader of your magazine since 1925, when some author's conception of weirdness was a gigantic ape dragging a half-naked female about a jungle, and I have watched it progress steadily upward to the zenith."

"[2] Besides Howard and Moore, he expressed appreciation in his letters for works of Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch,[3] and illustrator Virgil Finlay.

[4] Howard's death moved Ball to attempt writing for Weird Tales himself, and from 1937 to 1941 he contributed six short stories to the pulp magazine, then at its heyday under the editorships of Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith.

The setting of the first three is vaguely like Howard's Hyborian Age of warring kingdoms, the first featuring the barbarian adventurer Duar, an amnesiac king protected by a guardian sprite, and the other two Rald, a thief and mercenary.

[9] His mother was born September 16, 1874, in Millerstown, Perry County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Thomas Nankivell, a meat market proprietor, and Martha A.

The Miami catastrophe of 1927 [sic] occurred, and he and a friend trekked south to Florida, expecting to find heavy salaries waiting for eager workers.

Ball has slung hash, worked on dynamite crews as a capper, fry-cooked, run a dice table in a gambling-house, dug ditches, leveled auto springs, spread cloth in a shirt factory, and served beer in a Virginia tavern.

[16]Supplementing this account, Ball was back living with his grandfather and working as a laborer in the lumbering industry in 1930,[15] and at some point in the 1930s he attended college, completing one year,[17] He was apparently also married briefly during that decade, as in 1940 he was stated to be divorced.

[13] In 1935 he was reported to have been living with his mother and stepfather in Long Island City, Queens, New York,[13] probably in its Astoria neighborhood, from which his late 1930s fan letters to Weird Tales were sent.

Later Ball's mother and stepfather, and he apparently with them, moved to Harrisburg, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania; in April 1940 he resided with them at 629 Geary Street in that city.