Ed Wood: America's Most Prolific Novelist?

Edward D. Wood, Jr. has been called "The Worst Director of All Time" and is a winner of the Golden Turkey Award. He has made some of the most laughable, and entertaining, films to ever come out of the independent Hollywood scene. With classics like the hastily constructed Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958) and the surrealistically-autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953) Wood has placed an indelible mark on the art of film production resulting in a big-budget life story by movie giant Tim Burton, titled Ed Wood (1994). There is a lesser-known sidelight to Wood's career as a producer-writer-director-actor, almost another career entirely. Edward D. Wood, Jr. is one of America's most prolific short story writers and novelists.

Beginning in 1963, just to make meager ends meet for his wife Kathy and himself (insert: "booze"), Wood began to write for some of the major California smut publishers (this does not include Wood's unpublished, 1948 novel The Casual Company, a Marine comedy that led to his disastrous stageplay of the same name). He would continue to write novels, short stories and essays for the next fifteen years, until his death on December 10, 1978. In that time, Wood, under quite a large number of pseudonyms, is known to have penned at least 80 novels, hundreds of short stories and a slightly lesser amount of non-fiction.

There are more Wood writings discovered every year, usually under another of his many pseudonyms. Publishers like Gallery, Pendulum, Calga, Pad and others would publish sex, smut and sleaze novels at a breakneck pace through the sixties and seventies, and Wood, by all accounts, was the largest on staff "producer," meaning the volume of his work was a great deal more than his fellow writers. At the same time, Wood wrote many soft and hardcore porn screenplays for A. C. Stephen, Jacques Descent and Joe Robertson.