Leigh Brackett

Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915 – March 18, 1978) was an American writer, particularly of science fiction, and has been referred to as the Queen of Space Opera. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on such films as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). 2Life Leigh Brackett was born December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, California and grew up there. On December 31, 1946, at age 31, she married Edmond Hamilton in San Gabriel, California, and moved with him to Kinsman, Ohio. She died of cancer in 1978 in Lancaster, California. 2Career 3Fiction writer Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties, the science fiction story Martian Quest, appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940–42) were her most productive; occasional stories have social themes, such as The Citadel of Lost Ships (1943), which considers the effects on the native cultures of alien worlds of Earth's expanding trade empire. Brackett's first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler (the book led to her first big screenwriting assignment) and Brackett's science fiction stories became more ambitious. Shadow Over Mars (1944) was her first novel-length science fiction story and though somewhat rough-edged, marked the beginning of a new style, strongly influenced by the characterization of the 1940s detective story and film noir. In 1946 Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton and Planet Stories published the novella Lorelei of the Red Mist, in which the protagonist is a thief called Hugh Stark