Edwin Balmer was an American writer and editor, born in 1883 in Auburndale, Massachusetts, and he died in 1959. He was the son of Thomas Balmer, a lawyer, and grew up partly in Chicago. He attended the University of Michigan before moving into journalism and fiction writing in Chicago, a city that shaped much of his working life and creative output. Balmer built his career on two tracks that often intersected: magazine editing and popular fiction. He worked for a number of Chicago-based publications and eventually became editor of Redbook magazine, a position he held for many years and through which he exercised considerable influence over the American short-story market, publishing and encouraging many writers of the period. His editorial work made him a significant figure in the machinery of popular literature during the early to mid twentieth century, not merely as a producer of stories but as a gatekeeper and shaper of the commercial fiction scene. As a writer, Balmer was prolific and versatile, working in mystery, detective fiction, and science fiction. He is perhaps best remembered for two collaborative ventures. The first was a series of detective stories co-written with Chicago psychiatrist William MacHarg featuring Luther Trant, an early example of the "scientific detective" archetype who solved crimes using then-current psychological testing methods rather than pure deduction, reflecting the era's fascination with applied science and criminology. The second and more enduring collaboration was with Philip Wylie, with whom he wrote the science fiction novels When Worlds Collide, published in 1933, and its sequel After Worlds Collide, published in 1934. These novels, depicting the destruction of Earth by a rogue star and the survival of a small group of humans who escape to a new planet, became foundational texts of disaster-oriented science fiction and were adapted into a well-known 1951 film. Balmer's fiction generally combined a taste for scientific speculation and technical plausibility with the pacing and structure of popular adventure and mystery writing, a blend that suited the pulp and slick magazine markets of his day. He continued writing and editing into his later years, leaving a body of work that, while less remembered today than that of some contemporaries, was influential in shaping mid-century American genre fiction and magazine culture. He died in New Mexico in 1959.
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