Alfred Elton van Vogt was born April 26, 1912 on a farm near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the son of Henry van Vogt, an attorney, and Agnes (Buhr) van Vogt, a homemaker. His father seems to have been unstable financially and the writer's early life was marked by frequent migrations to and from various towns and villages in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Young Alfred was an enthusiastic reader of fairy tales until he was twelve, when a teacher's sarcastic comment made him ashamed of his taste in literature. When Alfred was fourteen, the family returned to Winnipeg. The shock of city life turned him into an introvert. He read two books a day for years, mostly detective stories.

Because of the family's poverty, young Alfred was unable to go to college, but he educated himself as best he could by haphazard but wide and intense reading—as...