Hillegas, Mark R
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1926-2000) US sf critic and professor of English who was based at Southern Illinois University. In 1961 he gave, at Colgate, one of the first university-level classes in sf in the USA (see SF in the Classroom). His academic study The Future as Nightmare: H G Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967) deals mostly with writers of Dystopias like Karel Čapek, Aldous Huxley, C S Lewis, George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamiatin, his approach reflecting a period when they were primarily thought of and treated as Mainstream Writers; it became a standard reference. A later work edited by Hillegas is Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969; exp 1979). His sf criticism, which includes a number of essays, was all published in the 1960s and 1970s. He won the Pilgrim Award in 1992. [PN]
Mark Robert Hillegas
born Glendale, California: 26 December 1926
died San Francisco, California: 22 August 2000
works
- The Future as Nightmare: H G Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) [nonfiction: hb/Ursula Suess]
works as editor
- Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) [nonfiction: anth: C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien, Charles Williams: hb/nonpictorial]
- Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979) [nonfiction: anth: exp of the above: hb/]
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