The most enjoyable biographies, I think, are of the people you’d never expect. Current bestsellers on Napoleon and John Adams are obvious. Then there’s Charles Fort. Who? Exactly.

As Jim Steinmeyer presents in CHARLES FORT: THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SUPERNATURAL, he was America’s premier chronicler of unexplained phenomena in a series of books that thumbed their noses at practical science. Without him, there might not be an X-FILES or RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT!

Born in 1874, Fort and his two brothers endured a most unhappy and abusive childhood at the hands of their widowed father. This may have much to do with Fort’s decision to drop out of high school to pursue a career as a newspaperman. Telling stories ticked his fancy, but his interests and style were more well-suited to fiction than fact.

Short stories followed, some of which found sporadic publication, thanks to Theodore Dreiser, a respected novelist who – for whatever reason – took a liking to Fort’s narratives, thinking him some sort of eccentric genius. Dreiser spurred Fort to stop wasting his time with short stories and move to novels, but the one that got published wasn’t exactly embraced with open arms by the public, leaving its author mired in poverty.

So Fort – an obsessive notetaker – turned to nonfiction, spending days upon days in the hallowed halls of the New York Public Library, seeking articles and other accounts of strange occurrences in the news that no one – not even scientists – could explain. Perhaps most famous among these is the report of frogs falling from the sky.

In 1919, Fort published his collection of these happenings – supplemented with his personal observations and theories – as THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. This caught on with readers, some of whom took him seriously, and some of whom dismissed him as a crank … yet poured over the entries anyway.

Via letters, notes and other correspondence, Fort gets to tell his own story from the grave in Steinmeyer’s bio. We get a clear picture of what he was like: painfully shy, often sad, prone to depression and perhaps just a tad crazed. Steinmeyer tells us these things, but then we get backup evidence from his subject, and the effect is enlightening; such access is not always present in bios, but luckily, writers tend to write about themselves.

Steinmeyer also uses healthy excerpts from Fort’s works, and they’re as baffling as you’d expect. Anyone interested in reading CHARLES FORT, however, will have to be making two purchases to get the full effect: one of this bio, and the other of its companion reissue THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF CHARLES FORT. This mammoth volume is more than 1,100 pages of absolute madness, containing the man’s quartet of the questionable: the aforementioned DAMNED, plus its follow-ups NEW LANDS, LO! and WILD TALENTS.

Despite Dresier’s ringing endorsement, Fort was not a good writer. He’s an interesting one, all right, but lucid thoughts appeared to elude him as much as social graces. The journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht put it best in his original review nearly a century ago: “For every five people who read Charles Fort, four will go insane.”

His sentences are clipped, which is a nice way of saying “run-on.” The way he strings them together are maddening. He uses far more words than need be to make a point. Any of the four books are best read in fits and starts, opening to a page at random, rather than front to back. And yet, I’m giving it a strong recommendation, because it exists in a world all its own. You’ll have nothing else quite like it on your shelf.

If the current slide toward a recession makes only one affordable, however, go for Steinmeyer’s bio. It gives you a good-sized taste of Fort’s works with the added benefit of how those works came to be. And as strange as Fort’s stories were, the story of Fort himself is, I’d argue, even stranger, making Steinmeyer’s book the most engaging biography of 2008 thus far. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.