The man who kept winter coming

At 78, George R. R. Martin remains the most famous unfinished writer in the world, a storyteller who reshaped modern fantasy and then found himself trapped inside the expectations he created.

On a peninsula in New Jersey, sometime in the late 1950s, a boy sold monster stories to the other children in his housing project for pennies, complete with dramatic readings. The business collapsed when a customer’s mother complained that her child was having nightmares.

That boy was George Raymond Martin, born in Bayonne on September 20, 1948, who added the confirmation name Richard at the age of 13 and who today celebrates his 78th birthday as one of the most widely read authors alive. The nightmares, it turns out, were only the beginning.

Martin’s world as a child was almost comically small. His family lived first in a house on Broadway that belonged to his great grandmother, then moved in 1953 into a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks. His father, Raymond Collins, was a longshoreman. His mother, Margaret Brady Martin, came from a family that had once owned a successful construction business before the Great Depression took it away, a loss the boy was reminded of daily as he walked past what had been the family dock and house.

His entire universe ran, by his own account, from First Street to Fifth Street, between his grade school and his home. He wanted desperately to travel. He could not. So he read, voraciously, and he invented. He wrote stories about a mythical kingdom populated by his pet turtles. The turtles kept dying in their toy castle, so the boy concluded they must be murdering one another in sinister plots.

Anyone who has read A Song of Ice and Fire will recognize the template. The kingdom, the castle, the dynastic slaughter. It was all there before he was ten.

The fanboy who bought ticket number one

At Marist High School, Martin became a devoted reader of Marvel Comics. He later said something that still startles literary critics: that Stan Lee may be the single greatest literary influence on his work, more than Shakespeare, more than Tolkien.

He wrote letters to the editor. One of them appeared in Fantastic Four issue 20 in November 1963, the first of many. Other readers wrote back, and through that correspondence Martin drifted into the young world of comics fandom, contributing fiction to fanzines. In 1964 he bought the first ticket to the first comic book convention held in New York. In 1965, at 16, he won comic fandom’s Alley Award for Best Fan Fiction for a prose superhero story called “Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier.”