E. Hoffmann Price

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E. Hoffmann Price, 1980

Edgar Hoffmann Trooper Price (born July 3, 1898 in Fowler , California , † June 18, 1988 in Redwood City , California) was an American writer for Pulp Magazine in the genres of fantasy and science fiction . He worked with HP Lovecraft on Through the Gates of the Silver Key .

biography

Originally intended to be a professional soldier , Price graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He served in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I and in the American military in Mexico and the Philippines .

He was a master fencer and boxer, an amateur orientalist , and a student of the Arabic language; Science fiction writer Jack Williamson described E. Hoffmann Price in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child as a "real living 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 . Still, he was most likely seen as a Weird Tales writer, one of the groups who wrote regularly for editor Farnsworth Wright . A group that also includes Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard , and Clark Ashton Smith . Price published 24 solo stories in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1950, as well as three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline and his work with Lovecraft, as noted above.

Its first sale was to Droll Stories in 1924, followed by the first of dozens of acceptances by Weird Tales , The Rajah's Gift (January 1925).

Price The Peacock's Shadow was the cover story for the November 1926 Weird Tales issue
The Dragoman's Jest , a collaboration with Otis Adelbert Kline, was the cover story for the winter 1932 issue of Oriental Stories

Some of Price's stories caused controversy; The Stranger from Kurdistan (1925), a story that included a dialogue between Christ and Satan, was criticized as blasphemous by some readers, but proved popular with Weird Tales readers . The Infidel's Daughter (1927), a satire on the Ku Klux Klan , angered some southern readers, but Wright defended the story.

Price worked in a number of popular genres - including science fiction, horror, crime fiction, and fantasy - but he was best known for adventure stories with an oriental background and atmosphere. Price also contributed to Farnsworth Wright's short-lived magazine Oriental Stories (1930-34), along with Kline, Howard, Smith, and other regular Weird Tales writers .

Like many other pulp fiction writers, Price could not support himself and his family on his income from literature. He lived in New Orleans in the 1930s and worked for Union Carbide for some time . Still, he managed to travel widely and befriend many other Pulp writers, including Kline and Edmond Hamilton . On a trip to Texas in the mid-1930s, Price was the only pulp writer who met Robert E. Howard face-to-face. He was also the only man known to have met Howard, HP Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith (the great "triumvirate" of Weird Tales writers) in person. Price experienced a major literary resurgence late in life. In the 1970s and 1980s, he published a number of SF, fantasy, and adventure novels that were published in paperback. The The Devil Wives of Li Fong (1979) is a notable example. He had also published two collections of his pulp stories during his life - Strange Gateways and Far Lands, Other Days .

Price was one of the first speakers for the Maltese Falcon Society in San Francisco in 1981 .

In 1984 he received the World Fantasy Award for life's work. In 1978 he received the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award . A collection of his literary memoirs, Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear, Fictioneers & Others , was published posthumously in 2001. Price was a Buddhist and a supporter of the Republican Party .

He died in Redwood, California in 1988.

Price and HP Lovecraft

When Lovecraft visited New Orleans in June 1932, Howard Price telegraphed to alert him of the visitor's presence, and the two authors spent much of the following week together. A disproved myth has it that Price took Lovecraft to a brothel in New Orleans, where Lovecraft was amused to find that some of the staff there were fans of his work.

Price and Lovecraft's meeting began an exchange of letters that lasted until Lovecraft's death. They even suggested setting up a writing team whose output, according to Lovecraft's bizarre prediction, would "conservatively be estimated at a million words a month." They planned to use the pseudonym "Etienne Marmaduke de Marigny" for their collaboration; A similar name was used for a character in Through the Gates of the Silver Key . Another collaboration was the short story Tarbis of the Lake .

This story originated in Price's enthusiasm for an earlier Lovecraft story. "One of my favorite stories about HPL was and is The Silver Key ," Price wrote in a 1944 memoir. "When I told him about the pleasure I had reading again, I suggested a sequel to explore what Randolph Carter did after his disappearance After persuading an apparently reluctant Lovecraft to collaborate on such a sequel, Price drafted a 6,000 word draft in August 1932. In April 1933 Lovecraft produced a 14,000 word version that Price estimates remained unchanged: "Less than fifty of my original words "although An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia reports that Lovecraft" retained as many of Price's concepts as possible, as well as some of his written language ".

In any case, Price was pleased with the results, and wrote that Lovecraft "was of course right about discarding all but the basics. I was amazed that he had made so much of my inadequate and insane start. " The story appeared among co-authors in the Weird Tales issue of July 1934; Price's design was published as The Lord of Illusion in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 10 in 1982.

Price visited Lovecraft, Providence, in the summer of 1933. When he and a man friend came to Lovecraft with a six-pack of beer, the abstinent Lovecraft is said to have remarked: "What do you do with so much of it?"

Bibliography (selection)

Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy-Adventure Stories (August 1935, Vol. 2, No. 5) with Death's Handmaiden
Tiger Cat , a collaboration between Price and Otis Adelbert Kline, was the cover story in Weird Tales for January 1940

Novels

  • Not published in German . (American English: Satans on Saturn . 1940.). (with Otis Adelbert Kline)
  • Not published in German . (American English: Yaqui Gold . 1940.).
  • Not published in German . (American English: By Land and Sea . 1943.).
  • Not published in German . (American English: The Devil Wives of Li Fong . 1979.).
  • Not published in German . (American English: The Jade Enchantress . 1982.).

Story collections

  • Strange Gateways , 1967
  • Far Lands, Other Days , 1975
  • Three Cliff Cragin Stories , 1987
  • Satan's Daughter and Other Tales from the Pulps , 2004
  • Valley of the Tall Gods and Other Tales from the Pulps , 2006

Short stories

  • Triangle with Variations , 1924
  • The Prophet's Grandchildren , 1925
  • Saladin's Throne Rug , 1927
  • The Word of Bentley , 1933
  • Double Catspaw , 1936
  • Revolt of the Damned , 1937
  • Hands of the Dead , 1937
  • 3 Graves in the Desert , 1940
  • Crab Bait , 1940
  • Khosru's Garden , 1940
  • Drink or Draw , 1943
  • Murderer's Moon , 1943
  • The Throne of King Kawoma , 1944
  • Sanctuary , 1944
  • Short-Cut to Hell , 1950
  • Exile from Venus , 1951
  • Escape from Hyper-Space , 1951
  • When in Doubt, Mutate! , 1952
  • The Seven Securities , 1952
  • Makeda's cousin , 1975
  • The Mirror of Ko Hung , 1980
  • The Lord of Illusion , 1982

Non-fiction

  • The Weird Tales Story , 1999
  • Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear, Fictioneers and Others , 2001

literature

  • An interview with E. Hoffman Price . The Diversifier 4, No 3. Interviewer - Fredrick J. Mayer.
  • Murray, Will. The Late E. Hoffman Price . Studies in Weird Fiction 4 (1988) 32-33.

Web links

Commons : E. Hoffmann Price  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ World Fantasy Convention: Award Winners and Nominees . Archived from the original on December 1, 2010. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  2. ^ "Price, E (dgar) Hoffmann", in Encyclopedia of Fantasy by John Clute and John Grant .
  3. ↑ Joshi and Schultz, p. 212.
  4. ↑ Carter, pp. 94-95.
  5. ^ E. Hoffman Price, The Acolyte , 1944; cited in Carter, p. 93.
  6. ↑ Carter, p. 93.
  7. ↑ a b Joshi and Schultz, p. 213.
  8. ↑ Carter p. 94.
personal data
SURNAME Price, E. Hoffman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Price, Edgar Hoffmann Trooper
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Fowler , California
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1988
Place of death Redwood City , California