GARYN G. ROBERTS, Ph.D., is the chair of the Communications/English Discipline of Northwestern Michigan College (Traverse City, Michigan). He was born and raised in Wisconsin, home of Stanley G. Weinbaum and the Milwaukee Fictioneers, August Derleth and Arkham House, Robert Bloch, Fredric Brown, Clifford Simak, Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.), and Peter Straub, and north of the land of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy and Ray Bradbury's Greentown, Illinois.
Roberts received his B.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater in 1981, his M.A. in Popular Culture Studies and Ph.D. in American Culture Studies (with emphases in English, History, and Sociology) from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, in 1983 and 1986 respectively. From 1986 to 1987, he taught in the English Department at Mankato State University, Minnesota; from 1987 to 1994, he taught in the American Thought and Language Department at Michigan State University; and in 1994, he joined the faculty at Northwestern Michigan College.
Beyond his family and friends (colleagues and students included), Dr. Roberts's loves and passions include Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, the writings and creative works of Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, the detailed and invaluable histories and scholarship of Sam Moskowitz, dime novels and related nineteenth-century fiction, the "pulps," classic newspaper comic strips, old movies, old radio, Big Little Books, comic books, paperback books, old TV, and other related forms of popular fiction and popular media.
Roberts is the author and editor of several books and a range of book chapters, articles, and literary dictionary entries. Subject matter of these includes, in part, dime novels, pulp magazines, 1950s Science Fiction invasion movies, pulp magazine editors Hugo Gernsback and Joseph T. Shaw, Jack London, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Kootz. In 1994, Roberts received an Edgar (Allan Poe) Award nomination in the "Best Critical/Biographical" category from the Mystery Writers of America for DICK TRACY AND AMERICAN CULTURE: MORALITY AND MYTHOLOGY, TEXT AND CONTEXT (McFarland, 1993). Currently, he is working on book-length tributes to Chester Gould, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury.
