Robert F. Young

Perhaps one of the lesser known names in this field, Robert F. Young’s career spanned more than thirty years, and he wrote fiction until he died. Only near the end of his life did the science fiction community learn he had been a janitor in the Buffalo public school system.

His production started in 1953 in Startling Stories, then Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. It mainly consisted of a long list of short stories with a poetic and romantic style that made him compared to Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. His most famous short stories are “The Dandelion Girl”, which influenced the director of the anime series RahXephon, and “Little Dog Gone”, which was nominated in 1965 for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.