Swem Library has recently mounted an exhibit to honor Will F. Jenkins, whom the General Assembly honored by resolution in February declaring June 27, 2009, Will F. Jenkins Day in Virginia. William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 16, 1896, and died in Gloucester on June 8, 1975. Although he lived elsewhere during his long career, he maintained his Virginia roots and kept a summer home in Gloucester, where he did much of his writing.

A pragmatist as well as a visionary, Mr. Jenkins was a master of commercially successful, mass-market science fiction who adapted his writing to changing tastes over a career of over fifty years. The “Dean of Science Fiction,” the nickname given to Mr. Jenkins by Time magazine in 1949, published seventy-four novels and 1,800 stories. During that time he won several awards, including two Hugo Awards, an annual award for the best science fiction or fantasy work. Many of these awards went to Murray Leinster, Mr. Jenkins’s literary double.

He loved to invent things (he was awarded two patents) and write about scanners, deflectors, coders and other forms of “advanced technology.” His early works in particular originated concepts that became common to the genre: time travel and parallel time, the scientist as hero and villain, advanced technology, lengthy space travel, and human contact with alien life forms. In a nod to the future, his 1946 story ”A Logic Named Joe” predicts the existence of networked home computers, the ability to find information online, and the inherent problems of censorship, scams, and the invasion of privacy.

Mr. Jenkins was a storyteller who wrote in a simple, straightforward style and whose settings usually centered in a hard-working, conservative, small-town America. His aliens tended to be either human-like and friendly or ugly, jellylike, and mean.

The staff of Swem Library is very grateful to the Jenkins family, in particular Will Jenkins’s daughter Wenllian (“Billee”) Stallings, for the loan of photographs, books, and other artifacts used in this exhibit. Images of the installed exhibit cases are available from the SCRC's Flickr page.

Curator: Hope Yelich, Reference Librarian; Exhibit design and installation: Chandi Singer, Burger Archives Assistant; Graphics: Karen McCluney, Swem Graphic Designer.