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The Author. Heretic Fort lives in The Bronx, N.Y., but has taken all knowledge as his province. As a boy (he is now 57) he decided to be a naturalist, then became a newshawk, wrote short stories which Theodore Dreiser published (1906) in the New Broadway Magazine. Guiding passion of Fort's life has been taking notes. He once burned a collection of 25,000 but soon had many more. He keeps his notes on odd scraps of paper in cardboard boxes. His ambition: "To try to find in the widest possible diversity of data, agreements that would signify something of cosmic order or law or formula; something that could be generalized." Though he styles himself a skeptic and doubts that two and two make four, caustic critics call Fort credulous, gullible. After a long day of notetaking Fort goes to the cinema or plays Super-checkers (a game of his own invention, resembling checkers, but played with 1,600 squares). Other works: The Book of the Damned, New Lands.
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