Born in New York City, Edgar Pangborn studied at Harvard from 1924 to 1926 before proceeding to the New England Conservatory of Music in 1927. After farming in Maine, he settled in Voorheesville, New York, with his sister Mary, where he lived until his death, except for service in the army from 1942 to 1946. His first novel was a mystery, A-100 (1930), published under the pseudonym Bruce Harrison; his first science-fiction work, however, was "Angel's Egg" (1951), and it is by work published after this story that he is now known. Unlike many science-fiction writers, Pangborn was not prolific, and though a sympathetic and witty friend by all accounts, he was not particularly active in the science-fiction community.

Yet Pangborn's work has attracted a select and vehement group of admirers. Damon Knight has praised Pangborn's "regretful, ironic, sorrowful, deeply joyous--and purblind--love of the world and all in it"; Theodore Sturgeon has called him a...