Alice Glaser (1929–1970)

Alice Glaser was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. Her parents were Lewis Glaser, a Russian-born lawyer, and his wife Hilda, a homemaker. She graduated from Woodmere High School and then Radcliffe College, where she wrote her senior thesis on Joseph Conrad.

Afterwards, she lived in Paris for several years and worked for various U.S. government agencies. She married and divorced Jean-Paul Surmain, and made friends in the expatriate science fiction community. Returning to New York in 1958, she went to work at Esquire magazine, rising to become associate editor. In that position, she acquired articles and stories from prominent authors. She also wrote articles of her own for the magazine. Her best-known contribution was "Back on the Open Road for Boys" (1963), describing the week she spent in India with Allen Ginsberg.
She also wrote book reviews for the Chicago Tribune. In 1961, her dystopian short story "The Tunnel Ahead" was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is one of the most frequently anthologized modern science fiction stories, and was adapted into the award-winning Norwegian short film The Tunnel (Tunnelen, 2016), directed by André Øvredal. Glaser died in 1970 after a fall, reportedly by suicide, at age 41.