About Robert Bloch
Robert Albert Bloch was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror, and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. He began his professional writing career immediately after graduation from high school, aged 17. He is best known as the writer of the novel Psycho (1959), the basis for the 1960 film Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 30 novels. He was a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, who was the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while he started emulating Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, he later specialized in crime and horror stories, often emphasizing psychological aspects of the characters within. The scene of Chaney removing his mask terrified the young Bloch ("it scared the living hell out of me and I ran all the way home to enjoy the first of about two years of recurrent nightmares"). Gauer was editor of The Quill, Lincoln's literary magazine, and accepted Bloch's first published short story, a horror story titled "The Thing" (the "thing" of the title was Death). During the 1930s, Bloch was an avid reader of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which he had discovered at the age of ten in 1927.
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