Leslie F. Stone

Leslie Frances Silberberg (June 8, 1905 – March 21, 1991), known by the pen name Leslie F. Stone, was an American writer and one of the first women science fiction pulp writers, contributing over 20 stories to science fiction magazines between 1929 and 1940.

Personal life Stone was born Leslie Frances Rubenstein in 1905 in Philadelphia to George S. Rubenstein and Lillian A. (Spellman) Rubenstein (a well known poet and author from the turn of the century), Stone married William Silberberg, a labor reporter, in 1927 with whom she had two sons they raised in the Washington, D.C. area where later in life she won prizes as a gardener and ceramist.

She worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, after her husband's death in 1957. She returned to writing by editing and republishing Out of the Void as a standalone novel in 1971. In 1974, Stone published Day of the Pulps, about her time publishing in the 1920s and 1930s. but Stone also included some of the first women and black protagonists Asking if Stone's writing is feminist Additionally, while her writing was similar in style to other works of the time, Stone used her work to critique racism,

Stone is cited (by figures such as Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl) Stone, herself, wrote in her unpublished "Reminiscences" that she chose to deliberately take advantage of her androgynous name, using only her middle initial to avoid the give-away gendered spelling of Frances. Indeed, she encountered several instances of sexism while trying to publish science fiction in the pulps and recalls hostile reactions from both editors (including Campbell and Conklin) and fans who learned she was a woman. However, she also reports that she was welcomed by Gernsback; readers' letters referring to Stone as male were corrected by the editor.