In his story, “Paper Pills,” Sherwood Anderson writes of the eccentric, old Doctor Reefy, ‎who would record his thoughts on small scraps of paper that he kept in his suit pockets. ‎Reefy would accumulate these balled-up bits of paper, “until he developed a truth out of ‎the thoughts.” Anderson’s character from his classic work, Winesburg, Ohio, while ‎fictitious, could easily have been inspired by his contemporary and fellow chronicler of ‎oddities, Charles Hoy Fort.

The new biography, Charles Fort - The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer portrays a ‎man as deeply peculiar as any of the “grotesques” in Anderson’s fiction. Pathologically ‎private, leery of others to the point of misanthropy, Fort devoted the bulk of his life to ‎researching odd phenomena, which he recorded on tiny paper notes. From the tens of ‎thousands of these “paper pills” Fort accumulated through his painstaking research, he ‎too “developed a truth.” Or, at least, he posited his own distinct cosmology over the ‎course of several books. Whether Fort was ever sincere in proposing that his version of ‎the strange workings of the universe merited his readers’ serious consideration, or not, is ‎far from clear.‎
If you’ve watched The X-Files, you’ve been exposed to the types of weird phenomena ‎Fort cataloged, from UFO encounters, to human combustion, to teleportation (a term he ‎originated). The X-Files’ lead agents also could have been inspired by Fort’s ‎indefatigable pursuit of the strange and unexplained, although Fort embodied both Scully ‎and Mulder characteristics in one person, both the skeptic and the believer.‎

For a figure still so present in contemporary culture, there have been few available ‎resources to learn about this fascinating character. A biography by Damon Knight, ‎seemingly the most authoritative until this, is long out of print. Based on the popularity of ‎the strange and supernatural in TV series, film, and fiction, the appearance of Jim ‎Steinmeyer’s book is well-timed.
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Throughout Charles Fort, Steinmeyer strikes a sensible balance between telling Fort’s ‎life story and trying to explicate his life’s work. Accounts of Fort’s disciplinarian father, ‎a successful merchant doling out abuse and other extreme punishment establish both a ‎possible source of Fort’s shyness and aversion to people, and his outrageous theory that ‎we humans “are property.” After escaping from his father’s influence, Fort embarked on ‎an ambitious journey of discovery, traveling the eastern U.S. and overseas to gather ‎experiences for his planned career as a writer.
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The “vast capital of impressions of life” that he accrued on these travels, however, was ‎not the basis for Fort’s work that has endured. Rather, it was the substantial portion of his ‎life spent making notes in libraries that informed most of his surviving work, (during ‎periods of depression, Fort destroyed several full manuscripts and countless of his notes). ‎The Book of the Damned, his breakthrough book that was the foundation of the rest of his ‎work, was based on bizarre happenings—mysterious creatures, unidentified flying ‎objects, inexplicable disappearances, rains of fish, frogs, and butter—the data that ‎Science has excluded, which have come to be known collectively as Forteana or Fortean ‎phenomena.
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Had he merely offered catalogs of these Forteana, it’s unlikely that Fort would be ‎remembered and read today, much less part of the English language. Interest in Fort has ‎endured due to his presentation of his singular views on the origins and deeper ‎implications of the unusual phenomena, based on a monistic principle that all reality is ‎one entity, and the suspension of judgment regarding the unexplained. He castigated ‎science for dismissing these phenomena, while forcing data to conform to theories in ‎order to explain others.
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While the hyperbolic designation, “Man Who Invented the Supernatural,” is eye-‎catching, it is also slightly misleading. Charles Fort, with his rejection of dogma of most ‎varieties, is more appropriately, “The Patron Saint of Skeptics.” Many of the theories he ‎proposes are so outrageous it’s hard to believe even Fort himself expected us to swallow ‎them. Surely he is giving his readers the knowing wink of the satirist when he suggests, ‎for example, a “Super-Sargasso Sea” in the sky that rains down all those objects that ‎science can’t account for falling from the sky. If Fort was genuine in advancing his ‎theories for the unexplained, of course, will never be known with certainty, although he ‎did disavow (like a true skeptic), “the products of minds . . . [as] subject matter for ‎belief,” stating, “I believe nothing of my own that I have written.”
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Steinmeyer’s book doesn’t definitively answer the question it poses—whether Fort was a ‎genius or a crank— nor does it set out to. Only Fort’s writing, much of which is still ‎available, might provide the right data to accurately categorize him. Charles Fort does ‎serve as a useful introduction to an intriguing, largely unknown figure that has had such ‎unique influence on popular culture.‎