Abraham Merritt's The Drone : a Forgotten Classic of Entomological Fantasy

70 Recent analyses of entomological influence in classic literature have included well-known authors such as Emily Dickinson (Rutledge 2003), John Donne (Cohen 2002), Robert Frost (Cohen 1999), and Vladimir Nabokov (Johnson and Coates 1999). However, it would be interesting to examine lesser-known contributors to entomological fiction. Having done much of my doctoral work (Coelho 1989) on drone honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) and having an ongoing interest in cultural entomology, recently I was surprised to stumble upon Abraham Merritt’s The Drone. Upon seeing the title, I thought most surely it would involve a mechanical device, such as an unmanned flying machine. It turns out to be entomological and an entertaining short story by an author who has been largely forgotten because he has slid into obscurity. Abraham Grace Merritt (1884–1943) was a descendent of James Fenimore Cooper (BlackMask Online, 2004). If potential writing skills have a heritable component, then perhaps Merritt carried some of these genes from his more famous ancestor. Though trained for a time in law, Merritt (Fig. 1) spent most of his life as a journalist, ultimately becoming editor of The American Weekly (Clute and Nicholls 1995). It might seem surprising that such a background would prepare him to write tales of fantasy with large doses of embedded biology, but apparently he had a passion for botany and was even a co-discoverer of the psychedelic properties of certain plants, such as datura. (The University of Adelaide 2004, Jeffery 2006). Furthermore, The American Weekly seems to have been what we would today call a tabloid (see Bleiler 1985). Abraham Merritt’s The Drone: a Forgotten Classic of Entomological Fantasy