L. Ron Hubbard - Early Literary Career and Alaskan Expedition

Early Literary Career and Alaskan Expedition

See also: Golden Age of Science Fiction

Hubbard became a well-known and prolific writer for pulp fiction magazines during the 1930s. Scientology texts describe him as becoming "well established as an essayist" even before he had concluded college. Scientology claims he "solved his finances, and his desire to travel by writing anything that came to hand" and to have earned an "astronomical" rate of pay for the times.

His literary career began with contributions to the George Washington University student newspaper, The University Hatchet, as a reporter for a few months in 1931. Six of his pieces were published commercially during 1932 to 1933. The going rate for freelance writers at the time was only a cent a word, so Hubbard's total earnings from these articles would have been less than $100. The pulp magazine Thrilling Adventure became the first to publish one of his short stories, in February 1934. Over the next six years, pulp magazines published around 140 of his short stories under a variety of pen names, including Winchester Remington Colt, Kurt von Rachen, René Lafayette, Joe Blitz and Legionnaire 148.

Although he was best known for his fantasy and science fiction stories, Hubbard wrote in a wide variety of genres, including adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mysteries, westerns and even romance. Hubbard knew and associated with writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and A. E. van Vogt. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, was published in 1937. He became a "highly idiosyncratic" writer of science fiction after being taken under the wing of editor John W. Campbell, who published many of Hubbard's short stories and also serialized a number of well-received novelettes that Hubbard wrote for Campbell's magazines Unknown and Astounding. These included Fear, Final Blackout and Typewriter in the Sky.

According to the Church of Scientology, Hubbard was "called to Hollywood" to work on film scripts in the mid-1930s, although Scientology accounts differ as to exactly when this was (whether 1935, 1936 or 1937). He wrote the script for The Secret of Treasure Island, a 1938 Columbia Pictures movie serial. The Church of Scientology claims he also worked on the Columbia serials The Mysterious Pilot (1937), The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1938) and The Spider Returns (1941), though his name does not appear on the credits. Hubbard also claimed to have written Dive Bomber (1941), Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936) and John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

Hubbard's literary earnings helped him to support his new wife, Margaret "Polly" Grubb. She was already pregnant when they married on April 13, 1933, but she had a spontaneous abortion shortly afterwards; a few months later, she became pregnant again. On May 7, 1934, she gave birth prematurely to a son who was named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr. and the nickname "His Nibs", invariably shortened to "Nibs". Their second child, Katherine May, was born on January 15, 1936. The Hubbards lived for a while in Laytonsville, Maryland, but were chronically short of money.

In the spring of 1936 they moved to Bremerton, Washington. They lived there for a time with Hubbard's aunts and grandmother before finding a place of their own at nearby South Colby. According to one of his friends at the time, Robert MacDonald Ford, the Hubbards were "in fairly dire straits for money" but sustained themselves on the income from Hubbard's writing. Hubbard spent an increasing amount of time in New York City, working out of a hotel room where his wife suspected him of carrying on affairs with other women.

Hubbard's authorship in mid-1938 of a still-unpublished manuscript called Excalibur is highlighted by the Church of Scientology as a key step in developing the principles of Scientology and Dianetics. The manuscript is said by scientologists to have outlined "the basic principles of human existence" and to have been the culmination of twenty years of research into "twenty-one races and cultures including Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, Philippine Tagalogs and, as he was wont to joke, the people of the Bronx."

According to Arthur J. Cox, a contributor to John W. Campbell's Astounding magazine, Hubbard told a 1948 convention of science fiction fans that Excalibur's inspiration came during an operation in which he "died" for eight minutes. (Gerry Armstrong, Hubbard's archivist, explains this as a dental extraction performed under nitrous oxide, a chemical known for its hallucinogenic effects):

Hubbard realized that, while he was dead, he had received a tremendous inspiration, a great Message which he must impart to others. He sat at his typewriter for six days and nights and nothing came out. Then, Excalibur emerged.

Arthur J. Burks, the President of the American Fiction Guild, wrote that an excited Hubbard called him and said: "I want to see you right away. I have written THE book." Hubbard believed that Excalibur would "revolutionize everything" and that "it was somewhat more important, and would have a greater impact upon people, than the Bible." It proposed that all human behavior could be explained in terms of survival and that to understand survival was to understand life. As Hubbard biographer Jon Atack notes, "the notion that everything that exists is trying to survive became the basis of Dianetics and Scientology."

According to Burks, Hubbard "was so sure he had something 'away out and beyond' anything else that he had sent telegrams to several book publishers, telling them that he had written "THE book" and that they were to meet him at Penn Station, and he would discuss it with them and go with whomever gave him the best offer." However, nobody bought the manuscript. Forrest J Ackerman, later Hubbard's literary agent, recalled that Hubbard told him "whoever read it either went insane or committed suicide. And he said that the last time he had shown it to a publisher in New York, he walked into the office to find out what the reaction was, the publisher called for the reader, the reader came in with the manuscript, threw it on the table and threw himself out of the skyscraper window." Hubbard's failure to sell Excalibur depressed him; he told his wife in an October 1938 letter: "Writing action pulp doesn't have much agreement with what I want to do because it retards my progress by demanding incessant attention and, further, actually weakens my name. So you see I've got to do something about it and at the same time strengthen the old financial position." He went on:

Sooner or later Excalibur will be published and I may have a chance to get some name recognition out of it so as to pave the way to articles and comments which are my ideas of writing heaven ... Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned.

The manuscript later became part of Scientology mythology. An early 1950s Scientology publication offered signed "gold-bound and locked" copies for the sum of $1,500 apiece (equivalent to about $29,000 now). It warned that "four of the first fifteen people who read it went insane" and that it would be "eleased only on sworn statement not to permit other readers to read it. Contains data not to be released during Mr. Hubbard's stay on earth."

Hubbard joined The Explorers Club in February 1940 on the strength of his claimed explorations in the Caribbean and survey flights in the United States. He persuaded the club to let him carry its flag on an "Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition" to update the U.S. Coast Pilot guide to the coastlines of Alaska and British Columbia and investigate new methods of radio position-finding. The expedition consisted of Hubbard and his wife — the children were left at South Colby — aboard his ketch Magician.

Scientology accounts of the expedition describe "Hubbard's recharting of an especially treacherous Inside Passage, and his ethnological study of indigenous Aleuts and Haidas" and tell of how "along the way, he not only roped a Kodiak Bear, but braved seventy-mile-an-hour winds and commensurate seas off the Aleutian Islands." They are divided about how far Hubbard's expedition actually traveled, whether 700 miles (1,100 km) or 2,000 miles (3,200 km).

Hubbard told the Seattle Star in a November 1940 letter that the expedition was plagued by problems and did not get any further than Ketchikan near the southern end of the Alaska Panhandle, far from the Aleutian Islands. Magician's engine broke down only two days after setting off in July 1940. The Hubbards reached Ketchikan on August 30, 1940, after many delays following repeated engine breakdowns. The Ketchikan Chronicle reported — making no mention of the expedition — that Hubbard's purpose in coming to Alaska "was two-fold, one to win a bet and another to gather material for a novel of Alaskan salmon fishing." Having underestimated the cost of the trip, he did not have enough money to repair the broken engine. He raised money by writing stories and contributing to the local radio station and eventually earned enough to fix the engine, making it back to Puget Sound on December 27, 1940.

He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.