An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Two distinctive groups of letters are the round-robin cycles, the Kleicomolo and the Gallomo. In these cycles, the various members (Kleiner, Ira A.Cole, Moe, and HPL in the first; Galpin, HPL, and Moe in the second) would sequentially write letters discussing one or more controversial topics; as the batches of letters circulated to each member, he would remove his previous contribution and write a fresh letter, commenting on the letters of the others. In an unsigned article (probably by Kleiner), “The Kleicomolo” ( United Amateur,March 1919), it was noted that “One of the members [Moe?] was desirous of keeping a complete copy of the correspondence, and began by copying the letters as they went through his hands. This task soon became so great as to be impracticable, and the rest elected him librarian and promised to send him carbon copies of their instalments.” But only the letters by HPL survive, and not many of these: only three to the Kleicomolo (1916–17) and four to the Gallomo (1919–21).

HPL’s involvement with his future wife, Sonia H.Greene, could presumably be traced in the many letters he wrote to her from 1921 to their marriage in 1924; Sonia herself reports that for two years HPL wrote letters to her almost daily, “sometimes filling 30, 40 and even 50 pages of finely written script” ( The Private Life of H.P.Lovecraft[Necronomicon Press, 1985 (rev. ed. 1992)], p. 18). But around 1935, two years after their last meeting, Sonia went out into a field and burned all the letters, so that only a few postcards now survive in private hands. In 1922 HPL came in touch with Clark Ashton Smith, to whom he would write 160 letters and 60 postcards. James F.Morton also became a close if argumentative colleague in 1922, and HPL’s letters to him are among the most remarkable he ever wrote for their breadth of subject and pungency of style.

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HPL’s solitary letter to the first editor of Weird Tales,Edwin Baird (February 3, 1924), and many letters to his successor, Farnsworth Wright, allow glimpses of HPL’s conflicted involvement with that pulp magazine.

HPL’s two years in New York (1924–26) are exhaustively chronicled in letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell; the letters to Lillian alone for this period total about 200,000 words. They allow nearly a day-to-day record of HPL’s activities and fluctuating temperament during this critical period in his life. Few letters to members of the “Kalem Club” (James F.Morton, Everett McNeil, Arthur Leeds, Long, George Kirk, Wilfred B.Talman, and others) survive for this period, since HPL saw them frequently in person. Letters to Talman are abundant for a later period. Upon his return to Providence, HPL came into contact with August Derleth and Donald Wandrei; his correspondence with these two writers survives almost intact. His letters to Derleth—more than 380—may represent the greatest number of letters to any of his correspondents. In 1930 HPL received a letter from pulp writer Robert E.Howard, and there began a sporadic but extremely voluminous correspondence that lasted until Howard’s suicide in 1936; the letters total roughly 200,000 words by HPL and 300,000 by Howard. HPL’s single longest surviving letter—70 handwritten pages (35 pages written on both sides) and totaling 33,500 words—was written to the little-known Vermonter Woodburn Harris in 1929. HPL’s work as revisionist caused him to come into contact with would-be writers, but only letters to Zealia Bishop (1928–30) and Richard F.Searight (1933–37) survive in any quantity. The letters to Adolphe de Castro (1928–36) are very scattered, and there are none to David Van Bush or Hazel Heald.

By the 1930s HPL had become a fixture in the worlds of pulp fiction and fantasy fandom, and he accordingly began corresponding with a great many fellow writers (notably E.Hoffmann Price [1932– 37] and Henry S.Whitehead [1931–32]) and disciples (R.H.Barlow [1931–37], Robert Bloch [1933– 37], Duane W.Rimel [1934–37], F.Lee Baldwin [1934–35], Donald A.Wollheim [1936–37], Wilson Shepherd [1936–37], C.L.Moore [1936–37], Fritz Leiber [1936–37], and Willis Conover [1936–37]). The letters to Whitehead were, however, evidently destroyed.