J. O. Bailey

Who was J. O. Bailey?

James Osler Bailey was a professor of literature who taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He wrote on a wide slate of topics ranging from the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Hardy to science fiction and utopian literature.

The Science Fiction Research Association gives recognition in the form of the Pilgrim Award in honor of his seminal work Pilgrims Through Space and Time. Reviewer Willy Ley, however, found the volume disappointing; while praising the core of the work, the master's thesis and doctoral dissertation written by Bailey years earlier, he faulted the remainder of the book as inferior, "obviously pasted to the original dissertation both loosely and clumsily."

He was struck by a car and died later from a blood clot, in 1979.