An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

HPL preserved relatively few letters he received over a lifetime of correspondence; not only because of restricted space in his usually cramped quarters, but because most of these letters probably did not seem to him of enduring interest. Exceptions are the early letters of Donald Wandrei (later ones were kept only sporadically) and the letters from Robert E.Howard, E.Hoffmann Price, C.L.Moore, and the amateur writer Ernest A.Edkins (1932–37). None of HPL’s letters to Edkins survive. Frank Belknap Long’s and James F.Morton’s letters survive in fair numbers but with many gaps and omissions; there are few letters by August Derleth. A fair number of Clark Ashton Smith’s letters are extant; substantial extracts have been published as Letters to H.P.Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1987). Late in life HPL admitted that he had 97 regular correspondents (HPL to R.H.Barlow, January 3, 1937 [ms., JHL]). On the purpose of maintaining such a far-flung correspondence HPL wrote: “As a person of very retired life, I met very few different sorts of people in youth—and was therefore exceedingly nar

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row and provincial. Later on, when literary activities brought me into touch with widely diverse types by mail—Texans like Robert E.Howard, men in Australia, New Zealand, &c., Westerners, Southerners, Canadians, people in old England, and assorted kinds of folk nearer at hand—I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge. Only correspondence could have effected this broadening; for it would have been impossible to have visited all the regions and met all the various types involved, while books can never talk back or discuss” ( SL4.389). It can thus be seen that, aside from all questions of courtesy and gentlemanliness, HPL’s correspondence was vital to his intellectual and aesthetic development, putting the lie to those critics who assert that he “wasted” his time writing so many letters.

The publication of HPL’s letters was a high priority with Derleth and Wandrei as they were founding Arkham House to preserve HPL’s work in book form. Wandrei in particular was determined to preserve HPL’s correspondence, and Derleth wasted little time in contacting HPL’s colleagues and urging them either to transcribe the letters themselves or to send the letters to him so that his secretary, Alice Conger, could transcribe them. In this way Derleth and Wandrei produced the socalled Arkham House Transcripts—nearly 50 volumes of single-spaced typescripts of letters (each volume averaging about 100 pages) upon which the long-delayed Selected Letters(published in 5 volumes in 1965–76, and largely edited by Wandrei) were based. These transcripts contain texts of many letters that may no longer survive in manuscript, as well as full (or, at any rate, more extensive) versions of letters published in abridged form in the Selected Lettersor not published at all. Otherwise, most of HPL’s letters now survive at JHL; the letters to Derleth are at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and a few other letters are scattered in other institutions or in the hands of collectors. The letters in the Selected Lettersare in almost every instance abridged, and occasionally the abridgements result in incoherence or a misleading impression of HPL’s meaning. Numerous typographical errors also mar the edition, as well as the absence of an index. S.T. Joshi has supplied the latter (Necronomicon Press, 1980 [rev. ed. 1991]). Joshi and David E.Schultz have prepared annotated editions of unabridged letters to individual correspondents, all published by Necronomicon Press: Letters to Henry Kuttner(1990); Letters to Richard F.Searight(1992); Letters to Robert Bloch(1993); Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett(1994). Also of note is Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters(Ohio University Press, 2000), in which Joshi and Schultz have arranged published and unpublished letters in the form of an autobiography, covering many aspects of HPL’s life, work, and thought.

See S.T.Joshi, “A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters,” in Selected Papers on Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1989).

Libo, P[ublius] Scribonius.

In “The Very Old Folk,” the proconsul of the Roman province of Hispania Citerior (Spain) who orders a cohort to investigate reports of peculiar events in the hills above Tarraco.