It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, edited and with an introduction by Josh Lukin, reviewed by Mark Rich

Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010; $21.00 tpb; 362 pages




These days few general readers know the Chandler Davis name. His main involvement in American popular fiction fell more than half a century ago; his nonfiction, while it includes works of more currency, has tended to appear in smaller-circulation or professional publications.

Davis in the 1940s and ’50s chose science fiction as a field of endeavor, although his contributions ended up being few enough to leave him largely unremembered in reference works. All the same, he occupied a place among the more politically conscious writers of science fiction in the troubled years after World War II. He pursued, too, mathematics and teaching and in the educational realm learned what others had learned earlier—that those “who advocated change and proposed to revise antiquated forms were called again and again ‘enemies of the University,’” in the words of Ortega y Gassett. After the Red Scare, Davis cut short his career at University of Michigan, opting to leave the United States and reestablish himself in Canada.