The Afterlife of Charles Fort

How the outcast intellect prophesied the twenty-first century

Crayon sketch of Charles Fort from The New York Herald, June 5, 1932

In the annals of American letters, early twentieth-century paranormalist writer / philosopher Charles Fort (1874–1932)—once dimissed by critics and publishers—ranks in influence with a handful of literary icons including Poe, Emerson, and Twain. Like Poe, Fort invented a genre. This genre is so unclassifiable yet omnipresent that we call it by the author’s adjectivized name: Fortean.

Across four books, the cartographer of the unexplained drilled holes in the straight story of materialist science and created the modern framework for documenting anomalies and the unknown. Fort’s work has not only endured into our age, but the outcast intellect influenced our quantum-entangled, binary-coded, multiversed conceptions of reality.