And just in time to serve as additional background for the Weird Tales panel planned for PulpFest — the panel to cover the editorial policies of longtime WT editor Farnsworth Wright, but of course concentrating on how those often bizarre policies impacted the writers who have emerged triumphant from those pulp pages, notably birthday boy H.P. Lovecraft.
Brought to light from the extensive Ransom trove in the Humanities Research Center in Austin — where the last unpublished Hammett stories and fragments and Including Murder have been housed — the letter is from Lovecraft to WT’s publisher dated February 2, 1924, at a moment when the first editor for the magazine is preparing to leave and they kind of want Lovecraft himself to take over the editorial reins.
Instead, they got Wright.
Must reading, needless to say, especially if you plan on witnessing the panel at PulpFest. And it is actually a typescript for the most part, rather than Lovecraft’s squiggly holograph, so you can breeze through without any translating-the-hieroglyphs pauses.
Lots of good stuff, including a plot synopsis for the “lost” HPL novel Azathoth — which by one turn of imagination or another obviously became The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
