Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett was an American author and screenwriter, nicknamed the Queen of Space Opera and one of the very few prominent women writing during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Her first novel was a hard-boiled mystery, No Good from a Corpse (1944), and it was good enough that Howard Hawks hired her to work on the script for The Big Sleep alongside William Faulkner. She wrote Westerns and crime films for Hawks over decades, and produced an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, elements of which survived into the finished film. She was married to the science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton.