Like Asimov and Heinlein, Alfred Bester (Dec 18, 1913-Sep 30, 1987) began his career in science fiction as a pulp fictioneer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF intermittently during his nearly fifty years as a professional writer, maintaining few ties with the field. He started his career in SF and finished it there as well, but in between, he kept to a pattern of voyage and return, putting SF aside for two extended intervals, first to script comics, radio mysteries, and teleplays and later to work as a magazine columnist and editor. Bester\'s reputation today rests primarily on a handful of widely reprinted stories and two landmark novels from his most productive period in the 1950s: The Demolished Man (1953), an SF-murder mystery hybrid that won the first-ever Hugo Award for Best Novel, and The Stars My Destination (1957), a sleekly savage and adult space opera that gained a cult following among readers. For most of his career, Bester\'s reputation remained that of an outsider. But over time and partly in his absence, Bester\'s reputation grew into more than just that of an outsider. Movers and shakers among later generations of writers--Michael Moorcock,Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, M. John Harrison, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among them--came to regard Bester\'s work as pivotal to SF\'s development--