Margaret St. Clair (17 February 1911 – 22 November 1995) was an American science fiction writer. Beginning in the late 1940s, St. Clair wrote and published, by her own count, some 130 short stories. St. Clair wrote that she “first tried [her] hand at detective and mystery stories, and even the so-called ‘quality’ stories,” before finding her niche writing fantasy and science fiction for pulp magazines. “Unlike most pulp writers, I have no special ambitions to make the pages of the slick magazines. I feel that the pulps at their best touch a genuine folk tradition and have a balladic quality which the slicks lack.”

Her early output included the Oona and Jick series of eight stories published from 1947 to 1949, chronicling the comic misadventures of “housewife of the future” Oona and her devoted husband Jick. The stories were ostensibly set in an idealized future but cast a satirical look at post-war domestic life, with its focus on acquiring labor-saving household devices and “keeping up with the Joneses.” St. Clair would later remark that the Oona and Jick stories “were not especially popular with fans, who were—then as now—a rather humorless bunch. The light tone of the stories seemed to offend readers and make them think I was making fun of them.”

She was especially prolific in the 1950s, producing such acclaimed and much-reprinted stories as “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (1951), “Brightness Falls from the Air” (1951), “An Egg a Month from All Over” (1952), and “Horrer Howce” (1956). She occasionally drew inspiration from her education in Classics and her knowledge of Greek myth, as in “Mrs. Hawk” (1950), a modern update of the Circe myth, “The Bird” (1951), about a modern man’s fateful encounter with the mythical phoenix, and “The Goddess on the Street Corner” (1953), in which a down-on-his-luck wino meets an equally vulnerable Aphrodite.

Three of her short stories were adapted for television. “Mrs. Hawk” was filmed as “The Remarkable Mrs. Hawk” for the 1961 season of Thriller, with Jo Van Fleet in the title role. “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” (1950) and “Brenda” (1954) were filmed as segments of the 1971 season of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. Ramsey Campbell has described St. Clair’s work as “startlingly original” and argues it has “yet to be fully appreciated.”