Who is L. Ron Hubbard? continued...
He soon realized, however, that formal study had little to offer. Or, as he put it, “To be very blunt, it was very obvious that I was dealing with and living in a culture which knew less about the mind than the lowest primitive tribe I had ever come in contact with. Knowing also that people in the East were not able to reach as deeply and predictably into the riddles of the mind as I had been led to expect, I knew I would have to do a lot of research.”
L. Ron Hubbard left college, again taking his quest to learn about life out into the world. He directed two expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition, a two-and-a-half month 5,000 mile voyage aboard the four-masted schooner, Doris Hamlin, and the West Indies Mineralogical Expedition, which completed the first mineralogical survey of the island of Puerto Rico under U.S. rule. Upon his return to the United States, and with scientific grants few and far between, he began to write to support his research.
His primary outlets were those now-fabled pulp fiction magazines that also helped launch the likes of Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dashiell Hammett. Although he contributed greatly to what is now known as the golden age of science fiction, factually Mr. Hubbard wrote in virtually every genre available to him—from adventure to mystery, Westerns to romance—and science fiction constituted only 17% of his prodigious output. As president of the New York chapter of the American Fiction Guild, he associated with many of the greats of the day, including L. Sprague De Camp, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, who remained a lifelong friend.
Yet throughout these busy years, he never forgot his primary purpose and continued his research into the human condition. He said of this period, ”... my writing financed research and this included expeditions which were conducted in order to investigate primitive peoples to see if I could find a common denominator of existence which would be workable.”
In recognition of this work, he was elected a member of the prestigious Explorers Club in New York City and bestowed custody of their flag, a high honor in the field of exploration, for the Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition in May 1940.
Continued
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