Who was Clifford Ball? Serious readers of sword and sorcery fiction may think they already have the answer. It goes like this. Clifford Ball was a reader and fan of Weird Tales in its 1930s heyday, one of a handful of writers who tried to fill the void left by Robert E. Howard’s passing by penning fantasies in the vein of Kull and Conan. As an early successor to Howard, his work has attracted a bit of scholarly mention since the 1970s, and a few of his stories were reprinted in the 70s and 90s. His collected fiction was finally issued in book form by DMR Books in 2018.

But Ball was a fantasy writer for only a brief portion of his life. Who was he beyond that? For many decades there was little more to say. Almost nothing was known of him other than what he himself revealed in six stories and three letters of comment published in Weird Tales from 1937-1941.

The letters tell us he had been a reader of the magazine since 1925, had become “especially enamored of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories,” and was strongly affected by Howard’s death. They tell us also that he appreciated the fiction of C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, and Robert Bloch, and the art of Virgil Finlay. His earliest letter and first published story show he was familiar with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. As his first two letters were posted from Astoria, New York (a neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens), we can assume he was living there around 1937-1938. Past that? The Internet Speculative Fiction Database gives him birth and death years of 1896 and 1947, respectively. (The birth year, as we will see, is wrong.) And that’s about it.

Going on fifteen years ago I wrote a Wikipedia article on the man. Why? Because there wasn’t one, and given Ball’s role in the development of sword and sorcery, I felt there should be. It was incidental to my work on Wikipedia; as a long-time reader of speculative fiction with a scholarly interest in the same, I’ve contributed genre-related articles to it since 2005. But I was certainly no authority on Clifford Ball, and initially the piece told only as much as the above three paragraphs—perhaps less.

It did, however, provide a convenient repository where anyone could leave additional information. In 2012, some anonymous editor finally did, contributing a snippet of hitherto overlooked biographical data from Ball’s own lifetime. It originally appeared in the October 1937 Weird Tales, in the wake of his first two stories there, in a miscellany headed “Random Notes by W. C., Jr.” Most of the “notes” were on other matters of interest to readers, but one, on page 510, was on Ball. The 2012 Wikipedia contributor quoted just part of it, but it is worth repeating in full:

“Clifford Ball’s next Rald story is The Goddess Awakes, a 14,000-worder. WT has also accepted Ball’s The Swine of Aeaea, 13,000 words, built around the legend of Circe the Enchantress. This 29-year-old newest sensation of WEIRD TALES has led a life as adventurous as that of either of his two barbarian heroes. He went through high school in Millerstown, Pennsylvania, experiencing great difficulty with his mathematics and with a young and attractive school-teacher of whom he became enamored. After he had been graduated, he took a job in the license bureau of the State Highway Department. A few months later he began to hate the place, and left. The Miami catastrophe of 1927 [sic] occurred, and he and a friend trekked south to Florida, expecting to find heavy salaries waiting for eager workers. The state was ‘broke;’ and tourists, alarmed by the tidal wave, were frightened away. Ball has slung hash, worked on dynamite crews as a capper, fry-cooked, run a dice table in a gambling-house, dug ditches, leveled auto springs, spread cloth in a shirt factory, and served beer in a Virginia tavern. This will always remain in Ball’s memory, he says, as the best moments of his life.”

Not all of what was reported was strictly accurate; the “Miami catastrophe of 1927” must actually have been the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. 1927 presumably refers to the date Ball showed up there seeking work. Still, W.C., Jr., whoever he was, had his story straight from the man himself, and the person who added it to the Wikipedia article is to be commended for bringing it to light. Here, at last, was concrete, contemporary information on Ball, material that could be verified and followed up on, possibly leading to more.

For six years, no one did. Ordinarily, I might have. I had originated the Ball article, and continued to monitor it. Furthermore, I’m experienced in researching literary, historical, and genealogical topics. Somehow, though, I overlooked this addition. It only came to my attention when subsequently quoted in Dave Ritzlin’s 2018 introduction to The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, the collected edition of Ball’s stories. That’s when I took notice and went to work.

Clifford Ball is a pretty generic name, and even with the “random notes,” my starting data was still scant. And it was all I had; Ball had been gone a long time, and anyone who might have known him was likewise dead or unreachable. But there are avenues to pursue even when the personal is unavailable. People shed bits of data on themselves all the time, and did even before the digital age—into newspapers, directories, public records, and records that in time become public. You just need to know where and how to look.

My main approach was genealogical. Before digitization and databases, this could be a slow, arduous process. Once I might have spent days or weeks tracking down my quarry on a microfilm reader at local libraries or a nearby branch of the National Archives. Technology has made such work much quicker and easier. With online resources aggregating historical personal data and well-indexed finding aids, much of it can even be done from home. I find several sites useful, but principally Ancestry.com.

I won’t try to give the blow by blow of my research—as fascinating as it can be for the person doing the detective work, I find most people are only interested in the results—and not always those. To many, there’s nothing as dull as someone else’s family history. But I can outline things.

A key piece of the new data was Ball’s stated age as of 1937—twenty-nine. This indicated a birth year around 1908, not 1896, as per the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Another key was the residence information from his youth—Millerstown, Pennsylvania, added to Astoria, New York from the Weird Tales years, per Ball’s published fan letters. With these starting points, I poured through federal census records, looking for people of the right name and age in the right places for given census years. It didn’t take long to settle on a single candidate. From the census I went to state records of birth and marriage, draft and military records, and digitized newspaper records. One thing led to another thing, creating additional datapoints to follow up on, dovetail, and slot into place, until a general picture began to emerge.

More specifically in the census records I found a Clifford Ball of the right age resident in Millerstown in 1910, 1920, and 1930. These records also gave me his birth state (New York), and the names of his mother, maternal grandparents, and stepfather. Turning to New York vital records, I turned up notices of his parents’ marriage and his own birth. I learned his full name—Clifford Nankivell Ball; Nankivell was from his mother’s maiden name, as I already knew from the census. Its appearance in other records would frequently confirm I was on the track of the right Clifford Ball—most notably in the records of his second marriage, celebrated in Boise, Idaho—not a place I would otherwise have expected to find him.

Other clues put me on the track of previously unanticipated life events. For instance, Ball’s 1940 census record lists him as divorced. This was prior to the Boise marriage, so I knew there must have been an earlier one, which I eventually turned up in a newspaper announcement.

Census and military records helped fill in the record of Ball’s education, employment and war service, led to the discovery of his two marriages, confirmed or uncovered moves to Astoria, New York, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland, and confirmed the previously recorded date of his death.

Accordingly, 2018 saw a lot of updates to Ball’s Wikipedia article, making it a piece of real value. More recent research on newspapers.com gave me access to Ball’s obituary and other material that has not yet made it into Wikipedia. Beyond the bare facts, we even have or can infer a few more intriguing ones. In his obituary we learn that Ball, like H.P. Lovecraft, was raised primarily by two maiden aunts in the absence of his own mother. And it’s difficult not to connect his early work “on dynamite crews as a capper” with his later bomb squad service in the Army Air Corps. Surely his previous experience must have counted, there! Suffice it to say, a lot more is now known of Clifford Ball than was known before. I append his biography as reconstructed below.

So, are we in a position to truly say “Who was Clifford Ball?” Well, sort of. We certainly have much more detail about his life and death. Yet much of what we’ve added is simply scaffolding, the outline of a life of which many of the richer, deeper, and more colorful details remain absent. Though we can now say when, where, and to whom he was born, where he lived, something about his various professions, and so forth, in one sense we are little closer to knowing who Clifford Ball was than we were at the outset.

In this we are in a position similar to that of Shakespearean scholars, who on the basis of surviving records have also put together a threadbare sketch of an outer life while likewise failing to illuminate the inner man. As with them, our surest guides to our subject’s inner life and interests remain those we started with—in Ball’s case, his published works, together with what he and “W. C., Jr.” set down in their letters and notes in Weird Tales. Having left no descendants, whatever else Ball might have left of a personal nature likely perished with him or his near heirs. The who we already had may have led us to a more complete picture of the life he lived, but how that life was reflected in his thoughts, hopes and dreams remains elusive.

That said, the picture we do have is not negligible, nor lacking in interest. Here it is. The following sketch is adapted from my Wikipedia article on Ball as it now stands, with some additions.

Clifford Nankivell Ball was an American fantasy writer whose primary distinction was having been one of the earliest post-Howard writers in the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy. He wrote as Clifford Ball.

He was born January 24, 1908 in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Howard Hamilton Ball and Emma Vaughn (Nankivell) Ball. Clifford’s father was born August 18, 1876 in New York, to Madison Monroe Ball and Hester (Secor) Ball, while his mother was born September 16, 1874 in Millerstown, Perry County, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Nankivell, a meat market proprietor, and Martha A. (Vaughn) Nankivell. Howard Ball and Emma Nankivell married January 23, 1907, in Manhattan.

The Balls separated within a few years of their marriage, and by 1910 Clifford and his mother were living with her parents’ family in Millerstown. She was working as a seamstress in a shirt factory at the time, but soon returned to New York, where she became a nurse at the Polyclinic Hospital, and found a second husband in Asel Bishop Porter. Clifford was left with his grandparents in Millerstown to be raised by his maiden aunts, Jennie and Lillie Nankivell.

Clifford was educated in Millerstown, completing four years in the local high school. where he later reported having difficulty in mathematics and becoming enamored of “a young and attractive school-teacher.” During this time his road to pulp writing began when he discovered Weird Tales magazine, of which, as he put it in a 1936 fan letter, he was “a constant reader … since 1925.”

After graduation he took a job in the license bureau of the State Highway Department, which he came to detest, and left after a few months. A rather footloose period followed. The year after the Great Miami Hurricane of September 1926 “he and a friend trekked south to Florida, expecting to find heavy salaries waiting for eager workers,” only to find the state “broke” and tourists frightened away. During the next decade, at various times, Clifford “slung hash, worked on dynamite crews as a capper, fry-cooked, [ran] a dice table in a gambling-house, dug ditches, leveled auto springs, spread cloth in a shirt factory, and served beer in a Virginia tavern. These, he later claimed, would “always remain in [his] memory … as the best moments of his life.” He also returned to his grandfather’s home in Millerstown for a time, working in the area as a laborer in the lumbering industry in 1930. His grandfather, then more than eleven years a widower, was likely ailing and may have needed the support; he died on August 9 of that year. At some point in the 1930s Clifford also attended college, completing one year.

Clifford married, first, on June 7, 1933, Hermine J. Mahle. She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Mahle of Woodside, Long Island. The Balls initially resided at 885 Columbus Avenue, New York City, but their marriage was of brief duration, ending in divorce. By 1935 Clifford was living with his mother and stepfather in Long Island City, Queens, New York, probably in its Astoria neighborhood, from which his late 1930s fan letters to Weird Tales were sent. It was in that residence that his literary career as a pulp writer began in the late 1930s.

Ball started writing in response to the death of Robert E. Howard, one of his favorite Weird Tales writers. In a 1936 fan letter he noted how he had “watched [the magazine] progress steadily upward to the zenith” over the eleven years he had been reading it, and how he felt “moved to offer my condolences upon the death of Mr. Howard. A hundred … Tarzans could never erase the memory of Conan the Cimmerian. Neither Northwest Smith nor Jirel of Joiry—and in [their creator] Moore you have an excellent author—can quite supplant his glory. When I read that Red Nails would be the last of Conan’s exploits I felt as though some sort of income, or expected resource, had been suddenly severed.” Besides Howard and Moore, he expressed appreciation in his letters for works of Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch, and illustrator Virgil Finlay.

Soon Ball began writing for Weird Tales himself, contributing to it six short stories over the next four years, from 1937 to 1941. The setting of the first three is vaguely like Howard’s Hyborian Age of warring kingdoms, the first featuring the barbarian adventurer Duar, an amnesiac king protected by a guardian sprite, and the other two Rald, a thief and mercenary. The remaining stories are more conventional fantasies.

During his writing career Ball continued to live with his mother and stepfather, moving with them to Harrisburg, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, where they resided at 629 Geary Street in April 1940. His work situation was unsettled in that year; he was engaged as a laborer on a W.P.A. project in April, while at another time he was unemployed. By November 29 he was living at 403 Annapolis Boulevard, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, and working in construction for national defense at Camp Meade.

By this time his brief literary career was likely over, his writing output curtailed when he joined the armed forces. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on January 27, 1941, in Baltimore, Maryland. The last of Ball’s stories to appear in Weird Tales was “The Werewolf Howls” in v. 36, no. 2, November 1941.

Military records give us a glimpse of his appearance at this time. According to his draft card, he was 135 pounds and 5 feet 10 inches in height October 16, 1940, with blue eyes and brown hair, a dark complexion, and a scar on his lower lip. At the time of his enlistment three months later, he was 69 inches (5 feet, nine inches) in height and 121 pounds in weight, showing some shrinkage, or at least, inconsistency in measurement! His civil occupation as of that date was reported as carpenter, and his permanent address as Perry County, Pennsylvania, where his aunts still lived.

Clifford served in the Army Air Corps over four years, including eighteen months service in the European Theater with the Eighth Air Force. While in the army Ball married again, wedding Jean E. Stewart on January 12, 1943 in Boise, Ada County, Idaho. She was born in 1906 in Falls City, Nebraska, and was at the time of their marriage a resident of Denver, Colorado.

Ball’s address was given as 35-16 34th Street, Long Island City, New York, on November 21, 1945. He was officially discharged from the Army in September 1946. From the date of his discharge to that of his death he resided in Baltimore. In 1947 he was employed at Butler Brothers, a Baltimore wholesale house.

Whether he might have taken up fiction writing again is an open question. War and family life may well have changed him, and in any case, little time was left to him. On the evening of January 11, 1947, Clifford Ball accidentally drowned in Baltimore. He was then thirty-eight years old. His survivors included his widow Mrs. Jean Ball of Baltimore, his mother Mrs. Emma Ball Porter of Long Island City, New York, and the two aunts who had raised him, Miss Jennie Nankivell and Miss Lillie Nankivell of Perry County, Pennsylvania.

Funeral services were held at 2:00 P.M., Thursday, January 16, 1947, at the Botdorf Funeral Home, officiated by the Reverend Elmer L. Ritzman, pastor of the Millerstown Methodist Church, of which Ball was and had long been a member. Ball was buried in Millerstown Riverview Cemetery, Millerstown, Perry County, Pennsylvania, where other members of his mother’s family are also interred, including his grandparents, mother, stepfather, aunts, uncle, and cousin. His grave marker cites his military service: “A.A.F. 788 Bomb Squad, U.S. Army.”

Ball’s writing for Weird Tales was remembered. Some of his stories have been reprinted from the 1970s onward, most notably in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. All his tales were collected together for the first time in book form in The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories (DMR Books, 2018).

Bibliography:

Collections

The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories (DMR Books, 2018)

Short stories

• “Duar the Accursed” (Weird Tales, v. 29, no. 5, May 1937; reprinted in New Worlds for Old, edited by Lin Carter (1971), and The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

• “The Thief of Forthe” (Weird Tales, v. 30, no. 1, July 1937; reprinted in Savage Heroes, edited by Eric Pendragon (1977), The Barbarian Swordsmen, edited by Sean Richards (1981), and The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

• “The Goddess Awakes” (Weird Tales, v. 31, no. 2, February 1938; reprinted in Realms of Wizardry, edited by Lin Carter (1976), and The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

• “The Swine of Ææa” (Weird Tales, v. 33, no. 3, March 1939), reprinted in The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

• “The Little Man” (Weird Tales, v. 34, no. 2, August 1939), reprinted in The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

• “The Werewolf Howls” (Weird Tales, v. 36, no. 2, November 1941), reprinted in 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg (1994), and The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories, by Clifford Ball (2018)

Letters

• “In Appreciation of Howard.” Letter in Weird Tales v. 29, no.1, Jan. 1937.

• “To Him the Laurels Belong.” Letter in Weird Tales v. 31, no. 1, Jan. 1938.

• “Rebuttal.” Letter in Weird Tales v. 31 no. 6, Jun. 1938.

Other sources for the material in this article include:

“Ball-Mahle” (marriage notice) in The News-Sun, Newport, Pennsylvania, 15 Jun 1933, Thu, page 4.
C., W., Jr. “Random Notes by W. C., Jr.” in Weird Tales v. 30, no. 4, Oct. 1937, p. 510.
“Clifford Nankivell Ball” (obituary) in The Perry County Times, New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, 16 Jan 1947, Thu, page 4.
De Camp, L. Sprague. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: the Makers of Heroic Fantasy, Sauk City, Wisc., Arkham House, 1976; pp. 277-278.
Episcopal Diocese of New York Church Records, 1767-1970 - record for Howard H. Ball and Emma V. Nankivell.
Findagrave.com. Entry for Clifford Nankivell Ball.
Idaho, Select Marriages, 1878-1898; 1903-1942 - record for Clifford Nankivell Ball and Jean E. Stewart.
Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Entry for Clifford Ball.
“Millerstown, July 29.” Notice in The Perry County Times, New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, 03 Aug 1939, Thu, page 5.
“Mrs. Martha (Vaughn) Nankivell” (obituary) in The News, Newport, Pennsylvania, 13 Dec 1918, Fri, page 1.
New York, New York Extracted Birth Index, 1878-1909 - record for Clifford N Ball.
New York, New York Extracted Marriage Index, 1866-1937 - record for Emma V Nankivell.
Notice in The News, Newport, Pennsylvania, 25 Jun 1915, Fri, page 4.
Notice in The Perry County Times, New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, 27 Aug 1925, Thu, page 1.
Notice in The Perry County Times, New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, 23 Jan 1947, page 4.
“Thomas Nankivell” (obituary) in The Evening News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 11 Aug 1930, Mon, page 8.
United States Federal Census, 1910 – family of Thomas Nankivell, Millerstown Borough, Perry County, Pennsylvania, SD13, ED 129, sheet 2A.
United States Federal Census, 1920 – family of Thomas Nankivell, Millerstown Borough, Perry County, Pennsylvania, SD 14, ED 138, sheet 2B.
United States Federal Census, 1930 – family of Thomas Nankivell, Millerstown Borough, Perry County, Pennsylvania, SD 18, ED 50-17, sheet 4B.
United States Federal Census, 1940 – family of Asel Porter, Harrisburg City, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, SD 19, ED 22-55, sheet 26A.
United States Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007 - record for Emma Vaughn Porter.
United States World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 - card for Howard Hamilton Ball, September 12, 1918.
United States World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946 - record for Clifford N Ball.
United States World War II Draft Card for Clifford Nankivell Ball, 1940 (with amendments through 1945).