Walsh, Chad
Entry updated 20 July 2026. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1914-1991) US academic, priest, poet and author, a professor of English at Beloit College, Wisconsin, from 1945 until he retired in 1977. He began to publish work of genre interest with C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949), returning to the subject of C S Lewis with an essay contributed to Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969; exp 1979) edited by Mark R Hillegas, and the useful study The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (1979). Walsh also wrote elsewhere about Lewis's friend and fellow-Inkling Charles Williams.
Nellie and Her Flying Crocodile (1956) is a Fantasy for children, whose young protagonist and her family are befriended by a dragon-like "bahagohunk" (see Supernatural Creatures) while summering at Lake Iroquois. Of greatest direct sf interest is Walsh's pioneering study of Dystopian fiction, published long before the boom in academic works about Fantastika: From Utopia to Nightmare (1962). A related essay is "Attitudes Toward Science in the Modern 'Inverted Utopia'" (May 1961 Extrapolation). [DRL]
Chad Walsh
born South Boston, Virginia: 10 May 1914
died Shelburne, Vermont: 17 January 1991
works (highly selected)
- Nellie and Her Flying Crocodile (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956) [illus/Marc Simont: hb/]
nonfiction
- C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949) [nonfiction: C S Lewis: hb/]
- From Utopia to Nightmare (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962) [nonfiction: Dystopia: hb/]
- The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) [nonfiction: C S Lewis: hb/]
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