Educated at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, Hamilton entered college at the age of 14 and, although a brilliant child, did not complete his studies and left school when he was seventeen. In the early 1920's he began to write science-fiction short stories and, in 1926, published his first story, The Monster God of Mamurth, in Weird Tales, beginning a life-long relationship with the magazine. Hamilton became one of the prime movers of science-fiction in America. In 1933, his story The Island of Unreason was the first winner of the Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year. In 1936, he produced The Horror of the Asteroid & Other Tales of Planetary Horror, the first hardback compilation of SF stories. In 1946 he married Leigh Brackett, a fellow SF author who would come to strongly influence his later work. That year he also began writing for DC Comics, providing stories for the likes of Superman and Batman. Although his output diminished after his marriage, the quality of his work improved and his novels of the late 1940's and 50's were both inspirational and carefully composed. It is these later works for which he is best remembered today. Hamilton also produced a number of crime and detective stories and from 1940 to 1950 published a series of stories on Captain Future. His other works include Crashing Suns (1928), Outside the Universe (1929), The Universe Wreckers (1930), The Sun Smasher (1954), Battle for the Stars (1956), Fugitive of the Stars (1957), The Haunted Stars (1960), Doomator (1966), The Weapon From Beyond (1967) and The Closed Worlds (1968).