E. Hoffmann Price

Edgar Hoffmann Trooper Price (July 3 1898, Fowler, California – June 18 1988, Redwood City, California) was a writer of popular fiction for the pulp magazine marketplace. Today he is perhaps best known for his collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key."

Biography

Originally intending to be a career soldier, Price graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point; he served in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, and with the American military in Mexico and the Philippines. He was a champion fencer and boxer, an amateur Orientalist, and a student of the Arabic language; science-fiction author Jack Williamson, in his 1984 autobiography "Wonder's Child", called E. Hoffmann Price a "real live soldier of fortune."

In his literary career, Hoffmann Price produced fiction for a wide range of publications, from "Argosy" to "Terror Tales," from "Speed Detective" to "Spicy Mystery Stories." Yet he was most readily identified as a "Weird Tales" writer, one of the group who wrote regularly for editor Farnsworth Wright, a group that included Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories in "the Unique Magazine" between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline, and his works with Lovecraft, noted above.

Price worked in a range of popular genres, including science fiction, horror, crime, and fantasy; but he was best known for adventure stories with Oriental settings and atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, Price also contributed to Farnsworth Wright's short-lived but fondly-remembered "Magic Carpet" (1930-34), along with Kline, Howard, Smith, and other "Weird Tales" regulars.

Like many other pulp-fiction writers, Price could not support himself and his family on his income from literature; living in New Orleans in the 1930s, he worked for a time for the Union Carbide Corporation. Nonetheless he managed to travel widely and maintain friendships with many other pulp writers, including Kline and Edmond Hamilton. On a trip to Texas in the mid-1930s, Price was the only pulp writer to meet Robert E. Howard face to face. Over the course of his long life, Price left significant reminiscences of many significant figures in pulp fiction, Howard, Lovecraft, and Hamilton among them.

Late in life, Price experienced a major literary resurgence; in the 1970s and '80s he issued a series of SF, fantasy, and adventure novels, published in paperback; "The Devil Wives of Li Fong" (1979) is one noteworthy example. He received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984. A collection of his literary memoirs, "Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear, Fictioneers & Others", was published posthumously in 2001.

H. P. Lovecraft

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". [H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Donald Wandrei, August 2, 1927; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 212.]

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. [Joshi and Schultz, p. 212.]

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". [Carter, pp. 94-95.]

That story had its origins in Price's enthusiasm for an earlier Lovecraft tale. "One of my favorite HPL stories was, and still is, 'The Silver Key'," Price wrote in a 1944 memoir. "In telling him of the pleasure I had had in rereading it, I suggested a sequel to account for [protagonist] Randolph Carter's doings after his disappearance." [E. Hoffman Price, "The Acolyte", 1944; cited in Carter, p. 93.] After convincing an apparently reluctant Lovecraft to agree to collaborate on such a sequel, Price wrote a 6,000-word draft in August 1932; in April 1933, Lovecraft produced a 14,000-word version that left unchanged, by Price's estimate, "fewer than fifty of my original words," [Carter, p. 93.] though "An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia" reports that Lovecraft "kept as many of Price's conceptions as possible, as well as some of his language." [Joshi and Schultz, p. 213.]

In any case, Price was pleased with the result, writing that Lovecraft "was right of course in discarding all but the basic outline. I could only marvel that he had made so much of my inadequate and bungling start." [Carter, p. 94.] The story appeared under both authors' bylines in the July 1934 issue of "Weird Tales"; Price's draft was published as "The Lord of Illusion" in "Crypt of Cthulhu" No. 10 in 1982.

Price visited Lovecraft in Providence in the summer of 1933; when he and a mutual friend showed up at Lovecraft's house with a six-pack of beer, the teetotaling Lovecraft is said to have remarked, "And what are you going to do with so "much" of it?" [Joshi and Schultz, p. 213.]

Bibliography

cience fiction

*"Operation Misfit" (1980)
*"Operation Longlife" (1983)
*"Operation Exile" (1985)
*"Operation Isis" (1986)

Fantasy

*"The Devil Wives of Li Fong" (1979)
*"The Jade Enchantress" (1982)

Collections

*"Strange Gateways" (1967)
*"Far Lands, Other Days" (1975)
*"Three Cliff Cragin Stories" (1987)
*"Satan's Daughter and Other Tales from the Pulps" (2004)

Nonfiction

*"The Weird Tales Story" (1999)
*"" (2001)

References

*S. T. Joshi and David Schultz, "An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia", Hippocampus Press (New York), 2004.
*Lin Carter, "Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos", Ballantine Books (New York), 1974.

Notes

External links

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