Alabama Book Covers (4): Wyatt Blassingame

After looking at the first six book covers below, you'd be excused from thinking that Wyatt Blassingame [1909-1985] might have been primarily an author of non-fiction books for juvenile males. That's pretty much what he did from the early 1950's until the early 1980's. These covers only give a small sample; he published dozens of such titles.

Yet in the 1930's Blassingame published hundreds of stories in pulp magazines. Many of the works fell into the "weird menace" category of horror and shudder pulps. These stories often provided readers with jolts of the supernatural as well as various permutations of murder, torture and women in peril. Many of the magazine covers patched all those characteristics together into a wonderfully lurid visual feast. 

Blassingame was born in Demopolis and educated at Howard College [now Samford University in Homewood; then located in Birmingham], the University of Alabama and New York University. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and several of his non-fiction works relfect that experience. He also wrote a number of novels, including several for adults.

I'll be doing a longer post on Blassingame in the future; meanwhile, enjoy the covers below. John Pelan's introduction to the current reprint of many of Blassingame's early stories can be found here.