Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence is almost as famous as his macabre, influential stories. According to biographers L. Sprague deCamp and S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft wrote more than 100,000 letters over a thirty year period, often having between 50 and 75 correspondents at any given time.
Many of Lovecraft's penpals were friends and associates from his involvement with the amateur journalism movement of the period, but he also received letters from fans of his Weird Tales stories, many of whom were fledgling writers of horror fiction themselves. Though many of the same subjects were discussed among both groups, the writers also shared their knowledge, stories and their opinions about what made for good weird fiction. With Lovecraft as mentor, they extended the possibilities of the weird story into the cosmic arena, moving beyond ghosts and vampires and werewolves, and back into the eons before mankind existed.
With Lovecraft's enthusiastic encouragement, they began to reference elements of each other's fiction in new stories. As Lovecraft fine-tuned his ideas about what constituted a superior weird story, and as he developed the loose pseudo-mythology that would one day become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, he dispersed these ideas in his replies.
Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard
One of the earliest and most important of these correspondents was the 19-year old Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994). He came into contact with Lovecraft in 1920 through their involvement in the United Amateur Press Association. Once they discovered their affinity for weird fiction, they became lifelong friends, spending a great deal of time together when Lovecraft lived in New York. Long had a long and successful career as a writer and worked in many mediums, from pulps to comic books, but he is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story, "The Hounds of Tindalos."
In 1922, Lovecraft read The Star Treader and Other Poems and Odes and Sonnets, two volumes of poetry by California author Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). Impressed, Lovecraft contacted Smith, thus beginning a correspondence that lasted until Lovecraft's death in 1937. The two men never met.
It was at Lovecraft's urging that Smith tried his hand at fiction, and he soon was selling regularly to Weird Tales and Wonder Stories. Absorbing Lovecraft's ideas, Smith nevertheless created his own mythical worlds, Xothique and Hyperborea, each with their own imaginary history.
Weird Tales reprinted Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" in the June 1930 issue, and a mistake in the underlying history of England prompted a letter from a young writer out in Cross Plains, Texas. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) had sold his first story the year before, and was still two years away from creating his immortal character, Conan the Barbarian. Howard had a sense of imaginary history as powerful as Lovecraft's own, and their letters back and forth are long and often contentious.
That same year brought Henry Whitehead (1882-1932) into the loosely formed 'circle.' A deacon the Episcopal church, Whitehead had been appearing in Weird Tales since 1924. Though he made wrote no Mythos stories, the high quality of his writing served as a reminder that weird fiction didn't have to be bad fiction.
The Lovecraft Circle After Lovecraft
Other prominent authors down through the years, none of whom ever met Lovecraft, were August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber; each made major contributions to the weird fiction genre over the course of their careers. Leiber took up Howard's sword and sorcery genre and raised it to new heights with his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series; Bloch evolved from supernatural horror to psychological horror, giving us Psycho.
After Lovecraft's death in 1937, the authors continued their association. Though highly individual in style and theme, they all carried the seeds of Lovecraft's influence to new fans. Derleth and Wandrei founded Arkham House in 1939 as a way of preserving Lovecraft's legacy and would later publish books by Smith, Long, Whitehead, Howard, Bloch and Leiber, as well as the two founders.
Between 1965 and 1976, Arkham House released five volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters, many of which are from his fellow weird fictioneers. In recent years various other publishers have issued single volumes devoted entirely to Lovecraft's correspondence with individual writers, including Smith, Howard, Wandrei and Derleth.
Through their long years of correspondence, these genre authors formed long-lasting, if long distance, friendships that are almost unique in the annals of literature. Whether he intended to or not, In the specific case of H. P. Lovecraft, these relationships substituted for his relative isolation. Whether he intended to or not, Lovecraft led the charge,and together these men changed the course of weird fiction, from the endless recycling of haunted castles and family curses into a modern, existential vision whose impact is still felt today.
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