Philip Francis Nowlan (; November 13, 1888 – February 1, 1940) was an American
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
writer, best known as the creator of
Buck Rogers
Buck Rogers is a science fiction adventure hero and feature comic strip created by Philip Francis Nowlan first appearing in daily US newspapers on January 7, 1929, and subsequently appearing in Sunday newspapers, international newspapers, books ...
.
Biography
Nowlan was born on November 13, 1888. While attending the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...
, Nowlan was a member of The Mask and Wig Club, holding significant roles in the annual productions between 1907 and 1909. After attending the University of Pennsylvania he worked as a newspaper columnist. Nowlan was married to Theresa Junker, and they had ten children.
He moved to the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd and created and wrote the Buck Rogers comic strip, illustrated by
Dick Calkins. He remained a writer on the strip until 1939. The
comic strip
A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics ter ...
ran from 1929-1967. Spin-offs included a radio-serial series ''
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century'' (sporadically aired from 1932-1947), a 1939 movie serial ''
Buck Rogers
Buck Rogers is a science fiction adventure hero and feature comic strip created by Philip Francis Nowlan first appearing in daily US newspapers on January 7, 1929, and subsequently appearing in Sunday newspapers, international newspapers, books ...
'', a brief 1950-51 television series, and a 1979-1981 television series ''
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century''.
Nowlan also wrote several other novellas for the science fiction magazines as well as the posthumously published mystery, ''The Girl from Nowhere''. He died from a stroke at his home in Bala in 1940.
Works
* ''
Armageddon 2419 A.D.'' (1928)
* ''The Girl from Nowhere'' (1928, (Neuauflage von 2005)
* ''The Airlords of Han'' (1929) on
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
* ''The Onslaught from Venus'' (1929)
* ''The Time Jumpers'' (1934)
* ''The Prince of Mars Returns'' (1940)
* ''Space Guards'' (1940)
* ''Wings Over Tomorrow: The Collected Science Fiction of Philip Francis Nowlan'' (2005, )
See also
*
List of Buck Rogers comic strips
Listing of the publication history for the ''Buck Rogers'' comic strip.
The history of the ''Buck Rogers'' comic strip is a complicated one. The early strips were numbered rather than dated, and every so often the numbering was restarted, creati ...
*
Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future
*
Buck Rogers XXVC
Buck Rogers XXVC (sometimes written as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) is a game setting created by TSR, Inc. in the late 1980s. Products based on this setting include novels, graphic novels, a role-playing game (RPG), board game, and video ...
(TSR game series)
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nowlan, Philip Francis
1888 births
1940 deaths
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American novelists
American male novelists
American science fiction writers
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Writers from Philadelphia
Buck Rogers