L. Ron Hubbard

   

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911–January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard, was a prolific and controversial American writer of fiction in all genres, science fiction, religious works, technical, educational and management texts, and miscellaneous reports, essays and poetry.

Biography

Hubbard's Church of Scientology has produced a large number of biographical publications which make extraordinary claims about his life, many of which are disputed. However, although the details are debated, there is general agreement about the basic facts of Hubbard's life.

Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska. During the 1920s, he travelled twice to the Far East to visit his parents during his father's posting to the United States Navy base on the island of Guam. He attended the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the George Washington University in Washington, DC between 1930-32 to study civil engineering but left before the end of his final year. He chose instead to pursue his talent for writing fiction, authoring numerous pulp magazine stories and novellas during the 1930s The Pulpateer (http://literary.lronhubbard.org/page29.htm). They were reasonably popular, earning Hubbard a deserved place in the hall of fame of the golden age of science fiction. He wrote primarily in the science fiction and fantasy fiction genres, though he also authored several Westerns. Literary critics outside Scientology consider Hubbard's best books of his pulp writing period to be Final Blackout, a controversial story about a war-ravaged Europe, and Fear, a psychological horror story.

The real war caught up with Hubbard after he joined the United States Navy in June 1941 as a lieutenant (junior grade). After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was posted to Australia. He subsequently commanded the harbor protection vessel USS YP-422 (based in Boston, Massachusetts) and the subchaser USS PC-815 (based in Astoria, Oregon). He was relieved of command of both vessels, in the latter case after shelling a Mexican island off Baja California. Most of Hubbard's wartime service was spent ashore in the continental United States. He was mustered out of the active service list in late 1945 and resigned his commission in 1950.

Hubbard was associated for a time with Jack Parsons, a rocket propulsion researcher at Caltech and associate of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. It is alleged that during this period Hubbard and Parsons were engaged in the practice of ritual magick. Among occultists today, it is near-consensual that Hubbard derived a large part of 'Dianetics' in particular from occult ideas such as the Holy Guardian Angel. The Church of Scientology insists that Hubbard was sent to put an end to Parsons' magickal activities, and to "rescue" a girl he was "using" for magickal purposes. Most critics of Scientology consider the Church's statements to be after-the-fact rationalizations. Crowley recorded in his notes that he considered Hubbard a "lout" who made off with Parsons' money and girlfriend in an "ordinary confidence trick". Two separate discussions of these events can be found in Bare-Faced Messiah (http://www.clambake.org/archive/books/bfm/bfm07.htm) and A Piece of Blue Sky (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/atack/bs2-6.htm) respectively. Another view to the relationship between Hubbard and Parsons is covered in The Marburg Journal of Religion (http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/frenschkowski.html).

In June 1950, Hubbard published a book describing the self-improvement technique of Dianetics. As he was unable to elicit interest from the medical or psychotherapeutic professions, the legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell agreed to publicise Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. Dianetics quickly became popular US-wide, but science fiction fans and writers were divided about its merits. Campbell backed Hubbard and A. E. van Vogt became Hubbard's treasurer, but Isaac Asimov and possibly others criticised Dianetics' unscientific aspects.

In mid-1952, Hubbard expanded Dianetics into an initially secular philosophy which he called Scientology. The following December, he declared it to be a religion and founded the first Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey. He moved to England at about the same time and during the remainder of the 1950s he masterminded the worldwide development of Scientology from an office in London. In 1959, he bought Saint Hill Manor near the Sussex town of East Grinstead, a Georgian manor house formerly owned by the Maharajah of Jaipur. This became the worldwide headquarters of Scientology.

From the mid-1960s, Scientology became very controversial across the English-speaking world with Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario all holding public inquiries (http://whyaretheydead.net/Cowen/audit/ofpapers.html) into Scientology's activities. In 1967, Hubbard left the controversy behind by appointing himself "Commodore" of a small fleet of Scientologist-crewed ships which spent the next eight years cruising the Mediterranean Sea. He returned to the United States in the mid-1970s and lived for a while in Florida.

In 1977, Scientology offices on both coasts of the United States were raided by FBI agents seeking evidence of a suspected Church-run espionage network. Hubbard's wife Mary Sue and a dozen other senior Scientology officials were convicted in 1979 of conspiracy against the United States Government, while Hubbard himself was named by Federal prosecutors as an "unindicted co-conspirator." Facing intense media interest and a number of lawsuits, he retired privately to a ranch on O'Donovan Road in Creston, California.

During the 1980s, Hubbard returned to fiction writing, publishing Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, a science fiction satire of 20th century events and culture published in 10 volumes. He also wrote a so-far unpublished science fiction screenplay called Revolt in the Stars. Hubbard's later science fiction works sold well receiving mixed reviews. Some believe that the books published under his name were actually ghostwritten by others, such as the late Robert Vaughn Young (although Young claimed, even after having left Scientology, that Hubbard wrote every word), a claim supported by people who were Scientology officials at the time and have since left the organization.

Hubbard convinced his supporters that he could give them access to their past lives, the traumas of which he said led to failures in the present unless they were audited, a process that proved very lucrative for his church, which paid emoluments directly to himself and his family. He claimed that a clear, like himself, would not suffer disease; his closest personal associates and doctors report that he went to great lengths to have evidence of his recourse to modern medicine suppressed, attributing the symptoms of disease to attacks by malicious forces.

Hubbard died in 1986, in an expensive Bluebird motorhome on his ranch. He had not been seen in public since 1981. Several issues surrounding Hubbard's death are a matter of great controversy — a swift cremation with no autopsy, the destruction of coroner's photographs, coroner's evidence of the psychiatric drug Vistaril present in Hubbard's blood, the whereabouts of Dr. Eugene Denk (Hubbard's physician) during Hubbard's death, and the changing of wills and trust documents the day before his death. The Church of Scientology announced his death in 1986, stating Hubbard had causatively departed his body to do "higher level spiritual research," unencumbered from the confines of his mortal body.

Following Hubbard's death, David Miscavige, one of Hubbard's former personal assistants, took over the leadership of the Church of Scientology.

The 2000 release of the film version of Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, starring Barry Pepper and John Travolta, was a critical and commercial failure. Hubbard's publishers continue to release "new" Hubbard books, although these are actually anthologies of short stories or short stories expanded into novels by other authors such as Kevin J. Anderson.

Partial bibliography

Fiction

  • Fear
  • Final Blackout
  • Buckskin Brigades
  • Typewriter in the Sky
  • Slaves of Sleep
  • Masters of Sleep
  • The Kingslayer
  • Battlefield Earth
  • Mission Earth series:
    • 1) The Invaders Plan
    • 2) Black Genesis
    • 3) The Enemy Within
    • 4) An Alien Affair
    • 5) Fortune of Fear
    • 6) Death Quest
    • 7) Voyage of Vengeance
    • 8) Disaster
    • 9) Villainy Victorious
    • 10) The Doomed Planet

Dianetics and Scientology

  • Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
  • Science of Survival: Prediction of Human Behavior
  • Dianetics 55!
  • Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought
  • Scientology: A New Slant on Life
  • Self Analysis
  • All About Radiation
  • Have You Lived Before This Life?
  • A History of Man
  • Clear Body, Clear Mind: The Effective Purification Program
  • Child Dianetics
  • Speaking From Experience : Illustrated Solutions to the Business Problems You Face Everyday
  • How to Live though an Executive
  • Purification: An Illustrated Answer to Drugs
  • Scientology 8-8008
  • Handbook for Preclears
  • The Volunteer Minister's Handbook
  • Introduction to Scientology Ethics

Unofficial Biographies

  • L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? by Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
  • A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack
  • Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller
  • Ron the War Hero by Chris Owen

External links

Official Sites

Negative Sites

Neutral Sites

Directories






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