Elms, Alan C
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1938- ) US psychologist, academic and author, whose professional interest in the nature of biography is most fully expressed in Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994), where he argues that a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach to psychobiography can be fruitful. Sf writers examined include Isaac Asimov, L Frank Baum, John W Campbell, B F Skinner (peripherally), Cordwainer Smith (pseudonym of Paul Linebarger) and Jack Williamson (intriguingly). In "Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch: Cordwainer Smith & Kirk Allen" (May 2002 New York Review of Science Fiction), Elms deepens his take on Smith/Linebarger through an examination of the plausible but unconfirmed claim that he was in fact the pseudonymous tale-spinning Kirk Allen analyzed in Robert Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1955; vt The Jet-Propelled Couch 1955). [JC]
Alan C Elms
born Gorman, Texas: 15 December 1938
works
- Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) [nonfiction: hb/Guenet Abraham]
links
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