Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the "inspired clown" (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them.
Fort's influence after he died isn't as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literature, where his fans stretched from the modernist avant garde to the science fiction pulps.
