Early Life and Career
Gardner F. Fox was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised Roman Catholic. Fox recalled being inspired at an early age by the great fantasy fiction writers. On or about his eleventh birthday, he "had gotten The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, books which "opened up a complete new world for me." In a time before comics existed, he "read all of Burroughs, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy," maintaining copies "at home in my library" some 50 years later.
Fox received a law degree from St. John's College and was admitted to the New York bar in 1935. He practiced for about two years, but as the Great Depression dragged on he began writing for DC Comics editor Vin Sullivan. Debuting as a writer in the pages of Detective Comics, Fox "intermittently contributed tales to nearly every book in the DC lineup during the Golden Age." He was also a frequent contributor of prose stories to the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s.
A polymath, Fox sprinkled his strips with numerous real-world historical, scientific, and mythological references, once saying, "Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me." For instance, in the span of a year's worth of Atom stories, Fox tackled the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the space race, 18th-century England, miniature card painting, Norse mythology, and numismatics. He revealed in letters to fan Jerry Bails that he kept large troves of reference material, mentioning in 1971, "I maintain two file cabinets chock full of stuff. And the attic is crammed with books and magazines....Everything about science, nature, or unusual facts, I can go to my files or the at least 2,000 books that I have."
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