Writer and speculator about the paranormal. Fort was the second of three sons born to a family of Dutch ancestry in Albany, New York. His mother died when he was four and the children were raised by his father, who was a strict disciplinarian.
Fort never went to college. For a time, he worked as a reporter and wrote and published short stories and a novel, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909). In 1916 he came into a small inheritance, which gave him freedom to pursue his own interests. For the rest of his life he conducted his own private study acquainting himself with the current facts and theories of scientific subjects and collecting reports on mysterious occurrences and anomalies, which he referred to as the “damned” or “excluded” because they did not accord with established scientific orthodoxy. Fie made notes and collected press clippings from old magazines and newspapers and filed them in shoe boxes in his study. At first he worked in the New York Public Library, and then, living in London in the 1920s, continued his inquiries in the British Museum Library.