Rick Sneary was a long-time L.A. fan, best known in fandom for his rallying cry “Southgate in ’58,” which brought the first fan convention to Southern California. Through the efforts of George Slusser and Daryl Mallet, Sneary’s collection was willed to the UCR library in 1993, upon his death. Sneary’s fan activity was centered in the 1940s and early 1950s, thus complements the Terry Carr Collection. More significantly, Sneary was a fan of correspondence. He not only wrote numerous letters of comments about SF writers in fanzines, but carried on a personal correspondence with many authors, including Ray Bradbury in his very early years as a writer. The Sneary collection, in the process of being organized, contains important literary materials.

Among these are manuscripts, personally addressed by Ray Bradbury to Rick Sneary, which constitute early versions of stories later to become famous. Particularly interesting are drafts of two stories—The Naming of Names and The Exiles—which were later incorporated into The Martian Chronicles, one of the central works of American fiction in the twentieth century.

A letter from early SF writer David H. Keller to Rick Sneary, dated November 30, 1948, responds to the letter Sneary sent him on November 22, in which he criticized Keller’s writing: “Your plots are all the same.” Keller sends Sneary a typed manuscript of his story The Perpetual Honeymoon, published in the Science-Fantasy Correspondant (November 1936). The title is written in Keller’s hand.

Sneary wrote thousands of letters on SF matters in numerous fanzines. Obviously his penchant for literary criticism, commenting on plot, characters and other narrative aspects, made him “response-worthy” to a number of writers. The Sneary collection is a gold-mine of critical interaction, where personal letters from and to respondents underlie printed fanzine exchanges.


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	The Rick Sneary Collection Rick Sneary was a long-time L.A. fan, best known in fandom for his rallying cry “Southgate in ’58,” which brought the first fan convention to Southern California. Through the efforts of George Slusser and Daryl Mallet, Sneary’s collection was willed to the UCR library in 1993, upon his death. Sneary’s fan activity was centered in the 1940s and early 1950s, thus complements the Terry Carr Collection. More significantly, Sneary was a fan of correspondence. He not only wrote numerous letters of comments about SF writers in fanzines, but carried on a personal correspondence with many authors, including Ray Bradbury in his very early years as a writer. The Sneary collection, in the process of being organized, contains important literary materials. Among these are manuscripts, personally addressed by Ray Bradbury to Rick Sneary, which constitute early versions of stories later to become famous. Particularly interesting are drafts of two stories—The Naming of Names and The Exiles—which were later incorporated into The Martian Chronicles, one of the central works of American fiction in the twentieth century. A letter from early SF writer David H. Keller to Rick Sneary, dated November 30, 1948, responds to the letter Sneary sent him on November 22, in which he criticized Keller’s writing: “Your plots are all the same.” Keller sends Sneary a typed manuscript of his story The Perpetual Honeymoon, published in the Science-Fantasy Correspondant (November 1936). The title is written in Keller’s hand. Sneary wrote thousands of letters on SF matters in numerous fanzines. Obviously his penchant for literary criticism, commenting on plot, characters and other narrative aspects, made him “response-worthy” to a number of writers. The Sneary collection is a gold-mine of critical interaction, where personal letters from and to respondents underlie printed fanzine exchanges.