Elmer Brown Mason
Introduction Brown's 1916 story "Black Butterflies" was reprinted in the April 1949 issue of ''Famous Fantastic Mysteries'''''Elmer Brown Mason''' (1877–1955) was an American writer. He studied at Yale for a period, but then transferred to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1903.Mason became an entomologist for the now-defunct Bureau of Entomology (USDA) in 1910.In addition, he was a seasoned world traveler. In 1915, his fantastic stories of scientists hunting rare species in the remote corners of the world started appearing. Of note were the five stories featuring swamp-guide, Wandering Smith, in ''The Popular Magazine'', especially "The Golden Anaconda"; and the variety of tales in ''All-Story Weekly'', highlighted by the horror-filled lost-race novelette "Black Butterflies," set in Borneo, and its sequel, "Red Tree-Frogs. "Mason was gassed in France during World War I, suffering permanent disabilities, which sidetracked his writing career. His globe-trotting ceased and his stories exchanged the fantastic for the domestic. His fiction writing career petered out around 1926.He had a brief revival in 1949-50 in the pulp magazines, ''Famous Fantastic Mysteries'' and ''Fantastic Novels'', which reprinted four of his stories from ''All-Story Weekly''. "Black Butterflies," was included in the anthology ''Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder'' ed. by Forrest J. Ackerman; Anne Hardin.
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