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February 25, 2012
A real live soldier of fortune
Champion fencer and boxer, amateur Orientalist, student of Arabic and pulp fiction writer, E. Hoffman Price was the only person known to have met Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft - the great 'Triumvirate' of Weird Tales writers - in person.
Price's relationship with H. P. Lovecraft did not get off to an auspicious start; in a 1927 letter, Lovecraft remarked that his story "The Strange High House in the Mist" was, after "grave consultation with E. Hoffman Price", rejected by Weird Tales' Wright "as not sufficiently clear for the acute minds of his highly intelligent readers".
But when Lovecraft visited New Orleans in June 1932, Howard telegraphed Price to alert him to the visitor's presence, and the two writers spent much of the following week together. The legend is not true that Price took Lovecraft to a New Orleans brothel, where he was amused to find that several of the employees there were fans of his work; the story, apocryphal or not, was first told about Seabury Quinn.
The two writers did seem to hit it off, beginning a correspondence that continued until Lovecraft's death. They even proposed at one time forming a writing team whose output would, "conservatively estimated, run to a million words a month", in Lovecraft's whimsical prediction. The joint pseudonym proposed for this ambitious collaboration—Etienne Marmaduke de Marigny—was used in slightly altered form for the name of a character in the one story that Lovecraft and Price did collaborate on, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
But when Lovecraft visited New Orleans in June 1932, Howard telegraphed Price to alert him to the visitor's presence, and the two writers spent much of the following week together. The legend is not true that Price took Lovecraft to a New Orleans brothel, where he was amused to find that several of the employees there were fans of his work; the story, apocryphal or not, was first told about Seabury Quinn.
The two writers did seem to hit it off, beginning a correspondence that continued until Lovecraft's death. They even proposed at one time forming a writing team whose output would, "conservatively estimated, run to a million words a month", in Lovecraft's whimsical prediction. The joint pseudonym proposed for this ambitious collaboration—Etienne Marmaduke de Marigny—was used in slightly altered form for the name of a character in the one story that Lovecraft and Price did collaborate on, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
Related: The Pulp Fictioneers - E. Hoffmann Price.
And: Through the Gates of the Silver Key by H. P. Lovecraft with E. Hoffmann Price.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 25, 2012 09:48 AM