If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.” —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

In this article, I explore the intersection of science fiction and modernist anthropology in a period of crucial development for both fields—the 1920s through the 1940s—by examining the ways in which Ray Bradbury’s “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” a central chapter in The Martian Chronicles (1950), engages in debates over culture and form that circulated among modernist anthropologists, artists, and critics. In recent years, scholars have argued that science fiction has a particularly close...

In a 1947 letter to Ernst Boas, the son of anthropologist Franz Boas, the American writer Muriel Rukeyser confesses, “May I tell you how, as it begins to open before me, how much this inquiry into your father’s life is meaning to me? The stories are very beautiful, the clues to further meaning are illuminating. I begin to see the power of the connections. I am very happy to be doing this.” In the same letter she writes that she is pregnant, a “happy” complication to the work. Rukeyser was writing the first biography of Boas, “the father” of American cultural anthropology, commissioned by his son in 1942, the year of his father’s death. Uniquely suited for such a task, she was on the forefront of the emergent field of science history, having just published her biography of the mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs the same year, which marked the beginning of her turn to life-writing as an “exploratory and experimental” entrance into a new “way of thinking,” as Eric Keenaghan has noted. While Rukeyser would write numerous biographies, the Boas project is significant—it was the only authorized biography she was commissioned to undertake, and it was the only one where she built the archive on which the narrative would be based, contacting Boas’s colleagues and family members and cataloguing their correspondences, collecting his journals and private writing, and traveling to Vancouver Island to live with and interview the Kwakw ak a’wakw peoples, whose artistic practices, myths, and lives were foundational to Boas’s theories. While the Boas biography was never finished, despite decades of research, Rukeyser’s engagement with the methods and origins of cultural anthropology would be career-defining, as she would find fruitful directives for her own work in many of the ideas and practices she encountered through her research on Boas and her time on Vancouver Island. As Catherine Gander writes, “Her lifelong poetic project of America was arguably informed partly by Boasian anthropological motives; she consistently sought both to comprehend and to reconstruct the usable tradition of her culture.” In this sense, then, Rukeyser would move beyond Boas as her main subject, looking past him towards the histories and material cultures that would help her formulate strategies that challenged the gender, racial, and formal ideologies of the Cold War. Rukeyser was undertaking this biographical project in an increasingly hostile climate, in which her own life—as a radical, queer single mother—was often used to justify the dismissal of her work. She was called a “threadbare” Sybil, a lesbian Helen, and a “gloomy humanitarian” in a period where women’s lyricism was encouraged to eschew the philosophical and historical in favor of “minute particulars.” Like many left-aligned writers, the expansive, multi-modal forms that made Rukeyser so successful in the 1930s were, by the mid-1940s, “rejected automatically by publishers and editors, not because of a deficiency of literary quality, but because they [had] dared being critical of prevailing political and cultural reaction.” Rukeyser’s incomplete biography of Boas is one of a series of midcentury projects that remained unfinished or unpublished because her work, and life, were seen as anathema to the political, literary and gender orthodoxies of the Cold War.