Goulart was born in
Berkeley, California, on January 13, 1933. He attended the
University of California, Berkeley, and worked there as an advertising copywriter in San Francisco while he started to write fiction. this parody of a
pulp magazine letters column was originally published in the
University of California, Berkeley's
Pelican. His early career in advertising and marketing, influenced most of his work. In the early 1960s, Goulart wrote the text for
Chex Press, a newspaper parody published on
Ralston Purina cereal boxes (Wheat Chex, Rice Chex, Corn Chex). He then wrote dozens of novels and countless short stories spanning many genres, using a variety of pennames He contributed to
P.S. and other magazines, along with his book review column for
Venture Science Fiction Magazine.
Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972) is his best known non-fiction book.
Fiction illustrated Ron Goulart's story "The Robot Who Came to Dinner" in
Analog (July–August 2002). Goulart's fiction is characterized by several themes, including technology gone wrong (usually through incompetence rather than malice) and protagonists with superhuman powers. The characteristic style of his work is satire and anarchic humor. His crime and science fiction works include tales about
robots and historical Hollywood figures, such as
Groucho Marx. In the 1970s, he wrote several novels based on
Lee Falk's
The Phantom for Avon Books, using the pseudonym "Frank Shawn" (a play on his wife and son's names). He has also written
comic book stories and short stories about The Phantom for
Moonstone Books from 2003 to the present. As a commercial freelance writer, Goulart has written novelizations for television programs such as
Laverne & Shirley, as well as romance novels using female pseudonyms. It is widely known that Goulart
ghost wrote the
TekWar series of books credited to the actor
William Shatner (Shatner is said to have written the outlines for the books). He has also ghosted novels featuring
the Phantom,
Flash Gordon and the pulp character
The Avenger. A collection of his mystery short stories,
Adam and Eve on a Raft, was published in 2001 by
Crippen & Landru.
Comics In the early 1970s, Goulart wrote several scripts for
Marvel Comics, mostly adaptations of classic science fiction stories. Later in the decade, he collaborated with artist
Gil Kane on the
Star Hawks newspaper strip. In the early 1990s, he scripted Marvel's
TekWar comics series.
Personal life Goulart was married to author Frances Sheridan Goulart and has two sons, Sean-Lucien and Steffan Eamon. He died from respiratory arrest at a nursing home in
Ridgefield, Connecticut, on January 14, 2022, one day after his 89th birthday. ==Awards==