The Outcast Manufacturers

The Outcast Manufacturers is the only published novel by Charles Fort. Fort wrote ten novels, though only one, The Outcast Manufacturers was published in 1909 and was later serialized in the American edition of Pearson's Magazine. Only five chapters were published in Pearson's. Understanding Fort's books takes time and effort: his style is complex, violent and poetic, profound and occasionally puzzling. Ideas are abandoned and then recalled a few pages on; examples and data are offered, compared and contrasted, conclusions made and broken, as Fort holds up the unorthodox to the scrutiny of the orthodoxy that continually fails to account for them. Pressing on his attacks, Fort shows what he sees as the ridiculousness of the conventional explanations and then interjects with his own theories. Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena.