Avram Davidson (April 23, 1923 — May 8, 1993) was an American Jewish writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as the author of many stories that do not fit into a genre niche. He won a Hugo Award and three World Fantasy Awards in the science fiction and fantasy genre, a World Fantasy Life Achievement award, and a Queen's Award and an Edgar Award in the mystery genre. Davidson edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1962 to 1964. His last novel A Treatise on the House Devil was completed by Grania Davis and was a Nebula Award finalist in 1998. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says "he is perhaps sf's most explicitly literary author".
Davidson wrote many stories for fiction magazines beginning in the 1950s, after publishing his first fiction in Commentary and other Jewish intellectual magazines.
He was active in science fiction fandom from his teens. His best-known works are his novels about Vergil Magus, the magician that medieval legend made out of the Roman poet Virgil; the Peregrine novels, a comic view of Europe shortly after the fall of Rome; the Jack Limekiller stories about a Canadian living in an imaginary Central American country modelled after Belize during the 1960s, and the stories of Dr. Eszterhazy, a sort of even more erudite Sherlock Holmesian figure living in the mythical Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, the waning fourth-largest empire in Europe.
In Joyleg, A Folly, written in collaboration with Ward Moore, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War (and of the Whiskey Rebellion) is found alive and very well in the Tennessee backwoods, having survived over the centuries by daily soaks in whisky of his own making to hilariously face the world of the 1960s.
Davidson also wrote dozens of short stories that defy classification, and the Adventures in Unhistory essays, which delve into puzzles such as the identity of Prester John and suggest solutions to them. His earlier historical essays were scrupulously researched, even when published by magazines just as happy to offer fiction as fact.
Very little may happen in a Davidson story, but he enjoyed describing it in enormous detail with many elements that beginning writers are told to avoid, such as page-long sentences with half a dozen colons and semi-colons, or an irrelevant digression in the opening pages of a story. Davidson success with this technique arose from his chutzpah and his skill with words and narrative structure, particularly a good ear for the way that people talk, an encyclopedic store of obscure and fascinating knowledge, and a comic view of the world that sees virtually everyone as eccentric.
The idea in his story "Or All the Seas with Oysters" (1958) is reputed to have become part of an urban legend in the street culture of some children; namely, that bicycles arise from a life cycle that involves paper clips as pupae and coat hangers as larvae. The English fantasy author Terry Pratchett reused the idea as a major plot-point in his Discworld novel Reaper Man.
Davidson was born in 1923 in Yonkers, New York. He served as a Navy hospital corpsman (medic) with the Marine Corps in the Pacific during World War II, and began his writing career as a Talmudic scholar around 1950. This made his study of and conversion to Tenrikyo in the 1970s rather surprising. Although he had a reputation for being quick to anger when anyone tampered with his work or misunderstood it, Davidson was also greatly in demand as a storyteller, and well-known among his friends for his extreme generosity.
He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America , a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.
While editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction he lived in Mexico, and later in British Honduras (now renamed Belize). He lived in a rural district of Novato, in northern Marin County, California, in 1970, but later moved closer to San Francisco. He lived in a small house in Sausalito, at the southern end of Marin County next to San Francisco in 1971 and 1972, and it was there fans and friends were affectionately welcomed. In his later years, he lived in Washington state, including a brief stay in the Veterans' Home in Bremerton. He died in his tiny apartment in Bremerton on May 8, 1993, aged 70. A memorial service was held in Gasworks Park in Seattle.
He was survived by his son Ethan and his ex-wife Grania Davis, who continues to edit and release his unpublished works.
