Sam Merwin Jr.

He was born on April 28, 1910, in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Samuel Merwin Sr.[1] He received a BA from Princeton in 1931 and studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

He began his career in mainstream journalism - as a reporter for the Boston Evening America (1932–1933) then as the New York City Bureau chief for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

[2] Merwin quit his editing job in 1951 to become a freelance writer, but his mysteries and science fiction books were only moderately successful, either commercially or critically.

Three of his detective stories had as an investigator Amy Brewster "a cigar-smoking, 300-pound lawyer-financier...Upper class but unfeminine" who solved mysteries for her friends.

[6] P. Schuyler Miller praised the novel as "roundly entertaining [and] firmly plotted [and] fully packed with all sorts of neat little bits of color and detail.

Merwin's novelette "The Final Figure" was the cover story for the final issue of Dynamic Science Fiction in 1954
Merwin's novelette "The Eye in the Window" was cover-featured on the May 1955 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly
Merwin added 10,000 words to Clement's novella "Planetfall" for its publication in the February 1957 issue of Satellite Science Fiction as "Planet for Plunder", under both authors' bylines