L. Ron Hubbard

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, known as L. Ron Hubbard (Tilden, Nebraska, 1911 – Creston, California, 1986), was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy who founded Scientology. He wrote through much of the twentieth century, during the heyday of the pulp magazines. He matters for two reasons: he was a remarkably prolific genre author, and, from the 1950s on, he built one of the most controversial religious organizations of his era.

Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana, the son of a naval officer. His father's postings took the family across the United States and overseas, and in the late 1920s Hubbard travelled to Guam and visited ports in China and elsewhere in Asia. He enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but left in his second year. By then he was already writing stories, and he married Margaret “Polly” Grubb, a fellow glider pilot who shared his love of flying.

His literary career took off in the 1930s. Between 1934 and 1940 he produced hundreds of stories and novels for pulp magazines, covering adventure, westerns, mystery, romance, travel and science fiction. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, appeared in 1937. Under the editor John W. Campbell he found a wider audience in Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction. Fear, a 1940 psychological horror story about an ethnologist who believes demons are after him, drew praise from writers including Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.

During the Second World War he served as a naval officer. He briefly commanded two ships but was removed from command both times, and his final months of service were spent in hospital, being treated for a duodenal ulcer. After the war, while working as an unlicensed counsellor, he began drafting what became Dianetics. In 1950 he published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, a pseudoscientific book proposing techniques for mental wellbeing. After losing the rights to the work in bankruptcy, he founded Scientology in 1952.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he spent much of his time aboard the organization's private fleet, as commodore of the Sea Organization, a group that former members describe as closely watched and unfree. He returned to the United States in 1975 and withdrew to the California desert. In 1978 a French court convicted him of fraud in his absence. He died in 1986, aged 74. His followers announced that his body had become an obstacle to his work and that he had chosen to “drop” it in order to continue his research elsewhere.

Hubbard remains a contested figure. The Church of Scientology portrays him as an explorer, traveller and thinker of many disciplines, though much of his autobiography is fictional. As a pulp novelist he still has readers, and his organization remains active, with a legacy that followers, former members and critics read in very different ways.