Slaves of Mercury

Nathaniel Schachner was born on January 16th in 1895 in New York City.Schachner served in the US military during World War I, in the industrially named Chemical Warfare Service, Gas and Flame Division.His first published story was 'The Tower of Evil', written with his fellow lawyer turned writer, Arthur Leo Zagat. It appeared in the Summer 1930 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. His first eleven stories were all co-written with Zagat before their collaboration stopped and thereafter he wrote under his own name or that of his pseudonyms including Chan Corbett and Walter Glamis.Schachner, who was trained as a lawyer and held an undergraduate degree, achieved his greatest success writing biographies of early American historical figures, which he began to write about a decade after starting his science fiction writing.Schachner published only one science fiction work in book form, Space Lawyer (1953), which had originally appeared in Astounding way back in 1941.His science-fiction career went into a decline after 1941 as the audience became more sophisticated and his own increasing interest and devotion to writing his historical works. These include several biographies of early American political figures, most notably his two volume work on Thomas Jefferson.Nathaniel Schachner died on October 2nd, 1955.