Larry Eisenberg (1919-2018)

Larry Eisenberg, 99, died December 25, 2018 in a Lincoln MA hospice of complications from leukemia. Eisenberg published dozens of SF stories in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, beginning with “The Mynah Matter” (1962), and is best known for his sequence of humorous SF stories about Emmett Duckworth, many collected in The Best Laid Schemes (1971).  Story “What Happened to Auguste Claro?” appeared in Dangerous Visions (1967).

Lawrence Eisenberg was born December 21, 1919 in New York City. He attended the City College of New York and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, getting a PhD in electronics. He served in WWII as a radar operator, and later worked as a biomedical engineer at Rockefeller University, where he was co-head of the electronics Laboratory. He taught there until retiring in 2000.

Though he became less active in SF during the ’80s, Eisenberg continued writing — notably in the form of over 13,000 poems (mostly limericks) posted in the comments of the New York Times online starting in 2008, which brought him a measure of fame (and earned him an obituary there headlined “Larry Eisenberg, 99, Dead; His Limericks Were Very Well Read”). His interest in limericks was lifelong — with George Gordon he published two Limerick books in 1965, Limericks for the Loo and Limericks for Lantzmen.

His wife Frances Brenner (married 1950) predeceased him in 2017. He is survived by a daughter and son.

For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.