Dorothy McIlwraith

Dorothy McIlwraith edited Weird Tales for fourteen years and four months, a run second in length only to Farnsworth Wright’s. The magazine came out every other month for all of it, 87 issues by ISFDB’s count. Her first credited issue is May 1940, vol. 35, no. 3. Its contents page reads “D. McILWRAITH, Editor” at the foot, with H. A. Perkins as associate editor, and gives the office as 9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York. Her last was September 1954, the final issue of the original magazine.

She was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and graduated from McGill University in 1914. A 1942 profile in Writers’ Journal called her “a pleasant, quiet, and soft-spoken woman” and said she had majored in Anglo-Saxon. She moved to the United States at Christmas 1917. The profile lists her early jobs at the American magazine, the Independent, and briefly the Rockefeller Foundation, before she joined Doubleday as a book manuscript reader. Her aunt, the author Jean Newton McIlwraith, had been a reader and editor for the same firm.

At Doubleday she assisted Harry E. Maule on Short Stories and became its editor in 1936. Short Stories, Inc., bought that magazine in 1937 and kept her on, then bought Weird Tales in November 1938 and moved it from Chicago to New York. Wright, by then in failing health, came with it. McIlwraith was assigned to assist him at the end of 1939 and took over with the May 1940 issue; Wright died that June. In 1942 Writers’ Journal reported that Weird Tales was buying stories of 4,000 to 12,000 words “of the fantasy, supernatural, pseudo-science, and horror type.” Perkins was her associate editor until September 1942, and Lamont Buchanan held the job from then until September 1949.

Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fredric Brown, Anthony Boucher, Joseph Payne Brennan, and Margaret St. Clair all first appeared in Weird Tales while she was editor. Leiber’s “The Automatic Pistol” is in her first issue. Terence E. Hanley credits her with bringing along beginning writers and artists, Bradbury above all, and with Frank Kelly Freas’s first Weird Tales cover, a piping Pan, for November 1950. Robert Bloch, who placed more stories in Weird Tales after May 1940 than before, defended her in a later interview: “I can’t dismiss anyone who published Bradbury, Sturgeon, Brown and other top talents.” He blamed the magazine’s rate of one cent a word for the writers she lost to better-paying markets. Robert Weinberg’s 1985 history of the magazine judged her issues less distinctive than Wright’s, and readers have argued the point since.

Weird Tales went to digest size in September 1953 and ended with the September 1954 issue. She left Short Stories the same month and kept working in New York until 1964, when she retired to a farmhouse she had bought in Ontario. She died in Orangeville, Ontario, on 23 August 1976, aged 84.