Gardner Fox
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Gardner Fox

Gardner Francis Cooper Fox (May 20, 1911 – December 24, 1986) was an American writer known best for creating numerous comic book characters for DC Comics. He is estimated to have written more than 4,000 comics stories, including 1,500 for DC Comics. Fox was also a science fiction author and wrote many novels and short stories.

Fox is known as the co-creator of DC Comics heroes Barbara Gordon, the original Flash, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Doctor Fate, Zatanna and the original Sandman, and was the writer who first teamed several of those and other heroes as the Justice Society of America, and later recreated the team as the Justice League of America. Fox introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics in the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds!".

Gardner Cooper Fox was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Julia Veronica (Gardner) and Leon Francis Fox, an engineer. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the comic book field, such as Jack Kirby and Jerry Siegel, who came from poor backgrounds, Fox came from an affluent family from Long Island. His family was of Irish and English descent, with his first known American ancestor being the either Irish-or-English born Richard Fox arriving in Connecticut in 1635. Fox had a sister, Catherine (born 1916), known as "Kay".

Fox recalled being inspired at an early age by the great fantasy fiction writers. On or about his eleventh birthday, he was given The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, books which "opened up a complete new world for me." 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 continued 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 a frequent contributor of prose stories to the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1940s.

On November 14, 1937, Fox married Lynda J. Negrini. They had two children, Jeffrey Francis Fox (born April 9, 1940), and Lynda Anne Fox (born March 21, 1943).

A polymath, Fox included numerous real-world historical, scientific, and mythological references in his comic strips, once saying, "Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me". For instance, during a year's worth of Atom comic strip stories, Fox referred to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 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 during 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".

Fox wrote both comic book scripts and prose fiction throughout his career. He began writing fiction for the pulp magazines and transferred to writing original paperback novels as the market shifted to that format in the 1950s.

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