He was natural around Norfolk, Virginia. In the period of World War I, he served with a Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917-1918). Charted the war, Leinster became a yours free!-mercenary writer. Within 1921, he married Mary Mandola. It got quaternion girl. When you took World War II, he served in the Office of War Information. He won a Liberty Award in 1937 for "A Very Nice Family," a 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Exploration Team," a retro-Hugo in 1996 for Best Novelette for "First Contact." Leinster was a Guest of Honor at a 21st Worldcon in 1963. Within 1995, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History was established, named when Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time."

Jenkins wrote & published across 1,500 short stories & articles across a course of his carreer. He wrote Xiv picture & hundreds of radio scripts & television plays, inspiring many series including "Land of the Giants" and "Time Tunnel".

He began appearing within the late 1920s in pulps such as Weird Tales so sold to Astounding in the Thirties regularly. Fallowing Globe War II, whilst two his title & the pulps got achieved a wider acceptance, he would have either William Fitzgerald or even Might F. Jenkins whilst list in stories when "Leinster" got already sold the piece to the particular issue. He was super prolific & successful around the fields of american, mystery, horror, &, naturally, especially in science-fiction.

He is credited by having a invention of parallel-universe stories. 4 years prior to "The Legion of Time" of Jack Williamson come Leinster's crucial story "Sidewise in Time", originally published around Astounding, June 1934. This was probably a number 1 instance that a unknown construct of replacement worlds appeared inside modern science-fiction. Around the sidewise path of instance a bit of cities never happened to exist as built. Leinster's vision of nature and severity's extraordinary cycles eventually ('sidewise eventually') experienced long-long-run symptom in more authors (e.g., Asimov's Lebensraum, A Red Queen's Race, or even a renowned A Prevent of Eternity).

Inside 2000, Leinster's heirs sued Paramount Pictures over the film Star Trek: First Contact, claiming that as a owners of the rights to Leinster's short story "First Contact", it infringed their trademark in the term. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Paramount's motion for summary judgment and dismissed the suit (see [http://wikisource.org/wiki/Estate_of_William_F._Jenkins_v._Paramount_Pictures_Corp. Estate of William F. Jenkins v. Paramount Pictures Corp., Ninety F. Supp. Second 706 (E.D. Va. 2000)] for the fully text of the court's opinion). A court witnessed that irrespective of whether Leinster's story 1st coined "first contact", it since became the generic (and so unprotectable) term that described a overall genre of science fiction where man number one encounter alien mintage. Possibly whenever a title was instead "descriptive"—the category of terms higher than "generic" that can be protectable—there was there are no grounds to believe that a title experienced a expected association in the public's mind (called "secondary meaning") such that its apply would commonly become understood when on to Leinster's story. A Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's dismissal forswearing comment.