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. He is not to be confused with the computer musician Rob Hubbard.
Hubbard's Church of Scientology has produced a large number of biographical publications which make extraordinary claims about Hubbard's life, many of which are disputed. However, although the details are hotly 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 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. 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 and Fear, the latter a controversial story about a war-ravaged Europe.
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 English magician Aleister Crowley. It is alleged that during this period Hubbard and Parsons were engaged in the practice of ritual magick. 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 of Scientology's critics 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". See A Piece of Blue Sky for a discussion of these events, from an anti-Scientology viewpoint.
In June 1950, Hubbard published a book describing the self-improvement technique of Dianetics, which he eventually expanded into a religious philosophy called Scientology. Because he had been unable to elicit interest from the medical or psychotherapeutic professions, he persuaded the legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell to publicise Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction Dianetics quickly became a US-wide craze, but science fiction fans and writers were divided about its merits: Campbell backed Hubbard and A.E. van Vogt became Hubbard's treasurer, while Isaac Asimov and 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 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 in great secrecy to a ranch near Hemet, California, where he later died. The time of Hubbard's death is a matter of some controversy: while the Church of Scientology announced his death in 1986, he did not appear in public after 1981.
Following Hubbard's death, leadership of the Church of Scientology was taken over by David Miscavige, one of Hubbard's former personal assistants.
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 ten volumes. He also wrote a so-far unpublished science fiction screenplay called Revolt in the Stars. Hubbard's later science fiction works sold well but received very mixed reviews. Many believe that the books published under his name were actually ghostwritten by others, a claim that has been supported by high-ranking Scientology officials who have left the organization.
In 2000, Hubbard's Battlefield Earth was made into a notoriously unsuccessful film starring Barry Pepper and John Travolta as the hero and villain respectively. Hubbard's publishers continue to release "new" Hubbard books - actually anthologies of short stories or short stories expanded into novels by other authors such as Kevin J. Anderson.
Fiction
Partial Bibliography
Dianetics and Scientology
Unofficial BiographiesExternal links
