Albany, New York, 6 August 1874. Charles Hoy Fort was born into a prosperous family and difficult circumstances. His mother, Agnes Hoy, died before he was five, leaving Toddy, as he was called, and his two younger brothers to the widowed Charles Nelson Fort. The paternal Fort was strict, physically abusive, bringing tears to Toddy’s eyes, blood to his nose — a tyrannical figure who cowed his sons into compliance but not respect or love. Impish from an early age, Fort developed an independent streak, perhaps in reaction to his father’s despotism, an intransigence that matured into a skepticism toward all forms of authority. He rejected religion — and what was taught at school. A compulsion to collect overcame him when he was young, another trait that would organize his adulthood, collecting and contumacy. Fort dropped out of high school, moved to Brooklyn, where, as he had at home, he worked as a journalist. In 1893, he used a small inheritance to travel, covering thirty thousand miles in three years. “All this to accumulate an experience and knowledge of life.” In 1896, illness forced his return to Brooklyn. He got reacquainted with Annie Filing, whom he’d known in Albany. She nursed him back to health. They married in October. The couple struggled to eke out a living, Annie becoming a laundress, Fort a dishwasher.
As Fort’s physical purview shrank, metaphysical and imaginative realms expanded before him. It was about this time that he met his gods. These gods — he named four in correspondence — drove him: they were orthogenetic, he said, working toward an unseen goal, transforming the rebellious son of an Albany grocer into the “enfant terrible of science.” Decomposition. Amorpha. Syntheticus. Equalization. The pantheon may have been a private joke, but if so, the lie became a kind of truth. Decomposition, he said later, was the god immediately in charge of the world, “this beautifully rotten existence of ours.” What better symbol for a life of toil and unfulfilled dreams?
Amid these trials, he began to scratch out short stories, breaking into the magazine market in 1905, mostly with closely observed stories about tenement life in New York. Theodore Dreiser, then an editor with the publishing house Street & Smith, thought Fort’s “were the best humorous short stories that I have ever seen produced in America.” He became a patron, buying some of Fort’s stories for the publisher’s flagship magazine Smith’s, offering critiques, cajoling and encouraging. He arranged the publication of Fort’s novel, The Outcast Manufacturers, in 1909. A few years later, another pair of inheritances stabilized the Forts’ financial situation, freeing both Charles and Annie from the need to work. Fort attributed this turn of fortune to the arrival of the goddess Amorpha, who prized orderliness. The new situation provoked a crisis. Fort fancied himself a bohemian, but now Annie demanded creature comforts: bigger apartments, bathrooms, more respectable neighbors — bourgeois amenities that Fort scorned.