Chandler Davis is a mathematician, educator, and science-fiction writer. His science fiction stories—primarily written in the 1940s and 1950s—dealt with a wide range of themes, including First Contact, communication and cooperation, nuclear disarmament, gender, and labour. A collection of his short stories and the eponymous novella was published by Aqueduct Press under the title It Walks In Beauty. He is one of the three people to lend their name to the annual Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture, organised by the University of Michigan, to commemorate their dismissal from the University during the McCarthy years.