Alfred Bester (December 18, 1913 – September 30, 1987) was an American science fiction author; TV and radio screenwriter; magazine editor; and scriptwriter for comics. He is best remembered for his science fiction, including the novel The Demolished Man, winner of the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953.

Science fiction author Harry Harrison wrote that "Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction".

Shortly before his death, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) named Bester its ninth Grand Master; the award was presented posthumously in 1988. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001.

Alfred Bester was born in Middletown, New York, on December 18, 1913. His father, James J. Bester, owned a shoe store and was a first-generation American whose parents were both Austrian Jews. Alfred's mother, Belle (née Silverman), was born in Russia and spoke Yiddish as her first language before coming to America as a youth. Alfred was James and Belle's second and final child, and only son. (Their first child, Rita, was born in 1908.) Though his mother was born Jewish, she became a Christian Scientist, and Alfred himself was not raised within any religious traditions; he wrote that "his home life was completely liberal and iconoclastic."

Bester attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Philomathean Society. He played on the Penn Quakers football team in 1935 and, by his own account, was "the most successful member of the fencing team." He went on to Columbia Law School, but tired of it and dropped out.

Bester and Rolly Goulko married in 1936. Rolly Bester was a Broadway, radio and television actress, the first to play the role of Lois Lane, which she did on the radio program The Adventures of Superman. She changed careers in the 1960s, becoming a vice president, casting director and supervisor at the advertising agency Ted Bates & Co. in New York City. The Besters remained married for 48 years until her death. Bester was very nearly a lifelong New Yorker, although he lived in Europe for a little over a year in the mid-1950s and moved to exurban Pennsylvania with Rolly in the early 1980s. Once settled there, they lived on Geigel Hill Road in Ottsville, Pennsylvania.^{[citation needed]}

After his university career, 25-year-old Alfred Bester was working in public relations when he turned to writing science fiction. Bester's first published short story was "The Broken Axiom", which appeared in the April 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after winning an amateur story competition. Bester recalled, "Two editors on the staff, Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff, took an interest in me, I suspect mostly because I'd just finished reading and annotating Joyce's Ulysses and would preach it enthusiastically without provocation, to their great amusement. ... They thought "Diaz-X" [Bester's original title] might fill the bill if it was whipped into shape." This was the very same contest that Robert A. Heinlein famously chose not to enter, as the prize was only $50 and Heinlein realized he could do better selling his 7,000-word unpublished story to Astounding Science Fiction for a penny a word, or $70. Years later, Bester interviewed Heinlein for Publishers Weekly and the latter told of changing his mind for Astounding. Bester says that he replied (in jest), "You sonofabitch. I won that Thrilling Wonder contest, and you beat me by twenty dollars."

However, as Bester was the winner of the contest, Mort Weisinger also "introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties." He met Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, Otto Binder, Malcolm Jameson and Manly Wade Wellman there. During 1939 and 1940 Weisinger published three more of Bester's stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. For the next few years, Bester continued to publish short fiction, most notably in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction.