Born Wayne Woodard in Kansas City, Missouri, Hannes Bok (a play on Johann Sebastian Bach, one of Woodard's favorite composers) was an artist and illustrator, as well as an amateur astrologer and writer of fantasy fiction and poetry. He painted nearly 150 covers and many illustrations for various science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction magazines. He was a protege of Maxfield Parrish, and so learned the painstaking layering and glazing process that produced a distinctive luminous quality in his paintings. Bok shared the Best Cover Artist award at the inaugural 1953 Hugo awards for science fiction achievement. Thanks to the efforts of Ray Bradbury, whom he met in 1937, Bok moved to New York and broke into commercial art at Weird Tales magazine, which also published several of his stories and poems. He remained in New York for the remainder of his life.