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Known and rightfully reviled for inventing Scientology, Hubbard was a carny from day one. His ridiculous stories of wrestling bears in Alaska and other such nonsense never failed to entertain editors and writers that he hung out with. Sounds like a fun guy to drink with as long as you were prepared to pick up the tab. How was he as a writer? His work ranges from mediocre to great... The great stuff includes things like Death's Deputy, Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, Slaves of Sleep, The Case of the Friendly Corpse, and The Indigestible Triton. The mediocre includes pretty much all of his science fiction, which is pretty clunky today, (if you're nostalgic for space opera, read Edmond Hamilton or E.E. Smith instead). The modern crap, (which I doubt was actually authored by Hubbard), should be avoided at all costs. Now, I've barely scratched the surface, the man generated over a million words a year for twenty years, there are westerns, adventure, war stories, detective tales, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that he did some romances. None of that stuff really appeals to me save for the detective genre and I can name at least 100 pulp authors that I'd rather read than Hubbard. Long and short: You can get cheap editions of a lot of his good pulp stuff (the key is if it was published in UNKNOWN, it's gold, anywhere else, not so much.) I do wonder how much credit we should give editor John W. Campbell for the quality of Hubbard's UNKNOWN stuff, it's so much better than anything else he wrote that I have to think Campbell's heavy hand reined in the crap and made Hubbard write a much more disciplined and coherent story than the stuff he got away with elsewhere. On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that the UNKNOWN format of slick urbane modern fantasy (often with a dose of humor) was just up his alley. Anyway, Fear remains a top ten horror novel eighty years after it was written and Typewriter in the Sky is still one of my favorite fantasy novels. So, despite churning out mountains of crap, Hubbard, like his contemporary Arthur J. Burks did enough good stuff to be numbered among the greats of the pulp era.