Amelia Reynolds Long (1904–1978)

Amelia Reynolds Long was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania. When she was six, she moved with her family to Harrisburg, where she lived the rest of her life. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931, and a master's degree the following year. As a young writer, she was among the first female creators of science fiction, and her short stories were published in the science fiction and weird pulp magazines of the 1930s. Her story "The Thought-Monster," published in 1930 in Weird Tales, was adapted into the 1958 British film Fiend Without a Face. Some of her works appeared under the byline "A. R. Long." In 1936, with William L. Crawford, she co-wrote the science fiction novel Behind the Evidence, loosely based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case; it was published under their combined pseudonym "Peter Reynolds".

In the 1940s, Long turned from science fiction to mystery novels, publishing more than 30 of them. In 1951, she gave up fiction and took a job as textbook editor for Stackpole Books. She also began to write poetry, and was a member of the Harrisburg Poetry Workshop of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society. She edited the society's 1977 anthology, Pennsylvania Poems. Later, she worked for 15 years as a curator at the William Penn Memorial Museum.