John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler

In 1924, he published his first novel, The Voice of the Seven Sparrows. Keeler began his career writing for several pulp magazines. Pointing to Keeler’s novel The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, Prenzler wrote, “It is, of course, impossible to provide a plot summary of a book that has no plot, or, perhaps more accurately, has 100 plots, all leading to nothing….” In a December 2005 article for The ( New York) Sun, Prenzler described Keeler as “the worst writer of mystery fiction who ever lived … Keeler is to good literature as rectal cancer is to good health.” On the other hand, Otto Prenzler, who edits mystery fiction, and operates The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, stopped nothing short of verbal brutality in dissecting Keeler’s writing. Ramble House Books described Keeler as “America’s most forgotten author, victim of a plot by publishers to weed out all writers who don’t write swift, easy-to-read, dumbed-down prose for the masses.”

At night, he wrote.Įarly in his career, Keeler wrote John Jones Dollar, a science fiction story about a dollar invested that grows to a huge sum of money over thousands of years because of compound interest. He took an electrician’s job at a steel mill. Keeler attended the Armour Institute, now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. His novel, The Box from Japan (1932) contains 312,348 words. Webwork stories tended to turn off his intended audiences, and his popularity suffered because the stories were so complicated and bizarre. In order to achieve that effect, Keeler throws plausibility out the window.” Poundstone explained that by the end of the novel, “all the subplots mesh together to produce a stunning surprise ending. According to author and skeptic William Poundstone, “This is a story in which diverse characters and events are connected by strings of wholly impossible coincidences.” Keeler, however, wrote what he branded webwork novels.

Keeler wrote more than 70 novels and numerous short stories.Īlthough usually labeled a mystery and science fiction writer, he also wrote in the historical romance and thriller genres. But the experience influenced the fiction he wrote.įor example, some of his characters with mental illness are unjustly committed to such institutions. When Keeler turned 20, his mother dispatched him to an insane asylum. Many considered him as sort of a wacky genius of American literature.īorn in Chicago in 1890, he stayed there most of his life. Harry Stephen Keeler stretched the boundaries of creativity in his writing.

John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler