May 15, 2013

Williams, Paul

Tagged: Author | Editor | Critic

(1948-2013) US editor and writer who founded Crawdaddy, the first US rock magazine, in 1966, which he edited through 1968, and then 1993-2003; author of several books on the subject, including some of the best books yet written on Bob Dylan (1941-    ), Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan (1990) and Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: The Middle Years, 1974-1986 (1992). As literary executor of the Philip K Dick estate he was from the first involved in the Philip K Dick Society and was instrumental in the wisely phased and commercially successful publication of Dick's posthumous works; in Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986) he set some early guidelines for the comprehension of Dick's difficult final decade. His interest in the work of Theodore Sturgeon was demonstrated in the early Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller (1978 chap), and culminated in his inception and editing of the first eleven volumes of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994-2010) [see Checklist below]. This enterprise eventually extended to thirteen volumes [for further details see Theodore Sturgeon], of which the last two were edited by Noël Sturgeon, Theodore's daughter, owing to the incremental effects of the bicycle accident in 1995 which partially disabled Williams through a brain injury, whose calamitous medical costs also affected his career, and which ultimately led to his early death.

Williams has been listed in error as the author of Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds (2011), whose author, Paul Williams, is an English academic. [JC]

Paul Steven Williams

born Boston, Massachusetts: 19 May 1948

died California: 27 March 2013

works (highly selected)

works as editor

series

Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

links

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