Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on November 19, 1911, in Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry as a child and sold her first poem at the age of six. She later moved to Gainesville, Georgia, where her father was a faculty member at the Riverside Military Academy. She attended the University of Alabama and Alabama College. Counselman's work appeared in Weird Tales, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and other magazines. Her stories were dramatized on General Electric Theater and other national television programs in the USA, Canada, the British Isles, and Australia. Counselman began writing weird fiction for the pulp magazines in the 1930s. Her tale "The Three Marked Pennies", written while she was in her teens, and published in Weird Tales in 1934, was one of the three most popular in all of Weird Tales history. Readers mentioned it in letters for years after its publication. Another story, "Seventh Sister" published in Weird Tales in January 1943, is a rare example of a voodoo story written by a woman. In describing her philosophy of writing horror fiction, she said, "The Hallowe'en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared." Later, Counselman worked as a reporter for The Birmingham News. Counselman taught creative writing classes at Gadsden State Junior College and at the University of Alabama. She completed a novel about witchcraft, and in 1976 received a $6000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. The late August Derleth anthologised her poems in and Fire and Sleet and Candlelight. For most of her life she resided on a houseboat in Gadsden, Alabama, with her husband, Horace B. Vinyard, whom she married in 1941, and a large entourage of cats.
Books
Half in Shadow: A Collection of Tales for the Night Hours . Reprint: London: William Kimber, 1980.
African Yesterdays: A Collection of Native Folktales. Centre, Ala.: Coosa Printing Co., 1975
Move Over – It's Only Me
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Supernatural – But Are Afraid to Believe
The short story "Parasite Mansion", first published in the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales was adapted into an episode of the Thrillertelevision anthology series, broadcast April 25, 1961. The episode is described as of above-average quality but undermined by its "blithe acceptance of the supernatural". It is, however, considered stronger than Counselman's original work.
