Hans Otto Storm

Hans Otto Storm (1895–1941) was a German-American novelist and radio engineer. His literary reputation quickly faded into obscurity after his early death, but in the 1940s received some positive praise from literary critic Edmund Wilson. He studied engineering at Stanford University and entered the emerging field of radio. He traveled in South and Central America, including long spells in Nicaragua and Peru.

Novels Storm's first novel, Full Measure (1929), is about industrial expansion and is strongest on the subject of radio engineering and equipment. The tyrant of the title is based on Augusto Leguía, President of Peru from 1919 to 1930, "whose rule was marked by rebellion, suppression of his opponents, and widespread corruption." His next novel, Made in the USA (1939) is a "social fable" about a tramp steamer full of passengers that becomes stuck on a sandbar in the South Pacific. Civilized behavior deteriorates and the passengers break into two warring camps.

His last novel, Count Ten (1940) is his longest and most heavily marketed; it follows thirty years of the life of its protagonist, Eric Marsden. In Edmund Wilson's estimation, the novel is "very much inferior on the whole to the ones that had gone before." Wilson also thought that it showed "what seemed internal evidence of having been written earlier," giving off the air of "one of those autobiographical novels that young men begin in college and carry around for years in old trunks."