Amelia Reynolds Long

Amelia Reynolds Long was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and moved with her family to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in childhood. She earned a B.A. in 1931 and M.A. in 1932, both from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. As a young writer, she was among the first female science fiction writers, and her short stories were published in the science fiction and weird pulp magazines of the 1930s. In the 1940s she left science fiction to write mystery novels, many of which were published under pseudonyms. Her style was influenced by Agatha Christie and her novels were "whodunit" books, as opposed to the hard-boiled crime novels that were more popular at the time. In 1951, she stopped writing mysteries and took a job editing textbooks for Stackpole Books in Harrisburg, PA, and she began to write poetry. She was a member of the Harrisburg Poetry Workshop of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society. In her later years, she was also a curator at the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.