He got dressed and, story in hand, took the porch steps at a gallop. He went back to bed, then threw off the covers after a couple of hours and wrote some more. Now, on that summer night when he couldn’t sleep, Jerry, twenty-one and unemployed, finally got up, put on his glasses, slipped into the bathroom so as not to wake his brother, and started writing. Another favorite character was Doc Savage, a pulp magazine hero whose first name was Clark and who was known as “The Man of Bronze.” Jerry tried his hand at creating his own comic strip takeoff on Tarzan called Goober the Mighty for his high school paper, the Torch, and won second place in the paper’s annual contest for a story called “Death of a Parallelogram.” But his grades were so awful he was eventually kicked off the newspaper. One of his favorite books, Gladiator, told the tale of a man with superhuman strength who could run faster than a train and jump higher than a house. He became so obsessed with comic strips and pulp magazines that he ignored his actual schoolwork and was held back.
Science fiction magazines would change Jerry’s life-though not for the better. With its disintegrating death rays and futuristic airships, early science fiction was a reaction to the technology that was sweeping the world and the inventions that were changing everyday life. Thanks to magazines, like Amazing Stories, that Harry brought home, Jerry discovered a new genre called science fiction.Īmazing Stories, which made its debut in 1926, was the first American science fiction magazine, featuring such stories as “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” which would eventually morph into Buck Rogers. Jerry’s older brother Harry got a job as a mailman to support them all. But three summers earlier, he had died of a heart attack after confronting a couple of shoplifters, leaving the family struggling in the midst of the Depression. He had run a secondhand clothing store in Cleveland. Jerry’s father, Mitchell, was a tailor who had come from Lithuania, fleeing anti-Semitism. But the umbrella turned inside out, and Jerry hit the ground-hard. Fly, seagull! Let’s see you fly!” He had actually tried to fly once, jumping off the garage, holding an umbrella. He had been bullied for years, kids taunting him with rhymes like “Siegel, Seagull, bird of an eagle. Jerry, a nerd with glasses, had had few friends at Glenville High-ignored not just by the girls but the boys, too. It involved a character like Samson, Hercules, and Moses all rolled into one-a new character that was an amalgamation of everything he had ever written or read. Twisting and turning, Jerry had a new idea for a story in his head. It wasn’t the summer heat that was keeping him awake nor his snoring older brother Leo snoozing noisily beside him. In a small attic bedroom in Cleveland, in the Jewish neighborhood of Glenville, Jerry Siegel tried to sleep.
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