Charles Fort was born into a fairly prosperous family of Dutch immigrants who owned a wholesale grocery business in Albany, New York State. He was the eldest of three brothers - the others being Clarence, and the youngest, Raymond. Their mother died within a few years of Clarence's birth and Fort's father married again during Fort's teens.
Beatings by his tyrannical father helped set him against authority and dogma, as he declares in the remaining fragments of his autobiography Many Parts. Escaping home at the age of 18, he worked as a reporter in New York City before hitch-hiking through Europe "to put some capital into the bank of experience." In 1896, aged 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa and returned to New York where he married Anna Filan (or Filing), an English servant girl in his father's house.
Fort and Anna settled down to a life of dire poverty in a succession of tiny apartments in the Bronx and Hell's Kitchen quarters of New York City. He took odd jobs between infrequent sales of his stories (most of which are now lost) to newspapers and magazines. At times things were so bad the Forts had to use their furniture for firewood. Where Anna "knew all her neighbours' affairs", Fort himself had very few friends. He virtually lived as a hermit, chasing references at the library until it closed and writing up his notes at home, pottering over them into the night. Were it not for Anna's insistence that he accompany her to the movies most evenings and the visits from Thayer and Dreiser, he had no social life.
His books are full of little asides that shed light on his daily life; for example, in Lo! (Ch.18) he says has cut down on smoking and almost given up drinking his home brewed beer because it went flat so quickly. His concentration was quickly soured by doubt, which was rare but drastic when it occurred, plunging him into a depression. Twice, he burned his collection of tens of thousands of notes because "They were not what I wanted." Undaunted, he would begin his exhaustive reading and note-taking all over again, but in a new direction.
In 1921, the Forts set sail for London, where he and Anna lived close to the British Museum (at 39A, Marchmont Street). For eight years, he undertook his 'grand tour' of the Museum's holdings several more times, at each pass widening his horizons to new subjects and new correlations. He began to think that space travel was inevitable, sending letters to the New York Times on the subject and even speaking on it at Hyde Park Corner.
Fort returned to New York in 1929, striking up an acquaintance with Tiffany Thayer, with whom he had corresponded. Thayer, a young and ebullient novelist, often visited the Forts, talking into the night, lubricated by home-brewed beer, surrounded by Fort's collection of mounted specimens of giant spiders and objects said to have fallen from the sky and the great wall of shoe boxes where Fort's notes roosted.
Fort grew progressively blind. On 3rd of May 1932, he was admitted to hospital suffering from "unspecified weakness". He died within a few hours, apparently of leukemia. He took notes almost to the end - the last one said simply: "Difficulty shaving. Gaunt places in face." After Fort died, Anna lost her interest in living and survived him by only five years.
Several times in his books, Fort refers to poltergeist-like events in their apartments in the Bronx and in London; inexplicable noises would be heard and pictures fell off walls. Dreiser once interviewed Anna after Fort's death and asked her if she had had any further strange experiences. She told him of rapping sounds and voices and then said ... "One afternoon [..] his aunt came over and she annoyed me terrible about this money. She said I had no right to it. I went to bed crying and in the night I thought he was sitting on a little bench or couch [..] He said: 'Hello, Momma,' and I was never so glad to see anybody in my whole life."
Charles Fort is buried in the family plot in a cemetary in Albany, New York.