Clifford Ball

Clifford Nankivell Ball (January 24, 1908 – January 1947) was an American fantasy writer whose primary distinction was having been one of the earliest post-Howard writers in the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy. He wrote as Clifford Ball.

Literary career Ball's road to pulp writing began in the mid-1920s, when he started reading Weird Tales magazine. As he put it in a 1936 fan letter, "I have been a constant reader of your magazine since 1925, when some author's conception of weirdness was a gigantic ape dragging a half-naked female about a jungle, and I have watched it progress steadily upward to the zenith." He became especially enamored of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. In the same letter he wrote "I feel moved to offer my condolences upon the death of Mr. Howard. A hundred international Tarzans could never erase the memory of Conan the Cimmerian. Neither Northwest Smith nor Jirel of Joiry—and in [their creator] Moore you have an excellent author—can quite supplant his glory. When I read that Red Nails would be the last of Conan’s exploits I felt as though some sort of income, or expected resource, had been suddenly severed." Besides Howard and Moore, he expressed appreciation in his letters for works of Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch, and illustrator Virgil Finlay.

Howard's death moved Ball to attempt writing for Weird Tales himself, and from 1937 to 1941 he contributed six short stories to the pulp magazine, then at its heyday under the editorships of Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith. The setting of the first three is vaguely like Howard's Hyborian Age of warring kingdoms, the first featuring the barbarian adventurer Duar, an amnesiac king protected by a guardian sprite, and the other two Rald, a thief and mercenary. The remaining stories are more conventional fantasies.

Ball's output for Weird Tales appears to have been curtailed by his joining the armed forces in January 1941. The last of his stories to appear was "The Werewolf Howls" in Weird Tales v. 36, no. 2, November 1941. the son of Howard Hamilton Ball and Emma Vaughn (Nankivell) Ball. They had married January 23, 1907, in Manhattan. in New York, He was also educated there, He then began a rather footloose period, a picturesque look back on which is given in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales:

This 29-year-old newest sensation of WEIRD TALES has led a life as adventurous as that of either of his two barbarian heroes. He went through high school in Millerstown, Pennsylvania, experiencing great difficulty with his mathematics and with a young and attractive school-teacher of whom he became enamored. After he had been graduated, he took a job in the license bureau of the State Highway Department. A few months later he began to hate the place, and left. The Miami catastrophe of 1927 [sic] occurred, and he and a friend trekked south to Florida, expecting to find heavy salaries waiting for eager workers. The state was "broke;" and tourists, alarmed by the tidal wave, were frightened away. Ball has slung hash, worked on dynamite crews as a capper, fry-cooked, run a dice table in a gambling-house, dug ditches, leveled auto springs, spread cloth in a shirt factory, and served beer in a Virginia tavern. This will always remain in Ball's memory, he says, as the best moments of his life. He was apparently also married briefly during that decade, as in 1940 he was stated to be divorced.

On November 21, 1945, his address was 35-16 34th Street, Long Island City, New York. He was buried in Millerstown Riverview Cemetery, Millerstown, Perry County, Pennsylvania.

Legacy Some of Ball's stories have been reprinted from the 1970s onward, most notably in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. All his tales were collected together for the first time in book form in The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories (DMR Books, 2018).