Martin Gardner's literary work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. Unsurprisingly, it is even less known in the French-speaking world, where almost none of his vast literary output has been translated.
Short-story writer and novelist
Gardner wrote a great many short stories, beginning with the one entitled Thang, published in 1936 in Comment, the University of Chicago's literary magazine. Gardner was then a philosophy student, and he signed it with a pseudonym he would use again: George Groth. Note that this use of pseudonyms, together with publication in short-lived or now-defunct magazines, makes assessing his body of work even more difficult…
This piece opens The No-Sided Professor and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery and Philosophy, a 1987 anthology of twenty-eight short stories. One of them, The Horse on the Escalator, published in Esquire Magazine, foreshadows many of the traits that would come to define Gardner's literary work: one of its narrative devices draws on topology!
In the 1940s, Gardner ran a regular page in the newly launched Humpty Dumpty's Magazine, filled with fun activities for children. He wrote short stories about Humpty Dumpty Jr., son of Humpty Dumpty, the magazine's purported editor. Publishing eight a year for a decade, he produced eighty such tales. They have never appeared in book form.
