Frank Belknap Long Popular Books

Frank Belknap Long Biography & Facts

Frank Belknap Long Jr. (April 27, 1901 – January 3, 1994) was an American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos alongside his friend, H. P. Lovecraft. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977). Biography Early life He was born in Manhattan, New York City on April 27, 1901. He grew up in the Harlem area of Manhattan. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was May Doty. The family resided at 823 West End Avenue in Manhattan. Long's father was a keen fisher and hunter, and Long accompanied the family on annual summer vacations from the age of six months to 17, usually in the Thousand Islands region on the Canadian shore, about seven miles from the village of Gananoque. When he was three years old, on one of these vacations, Long fell into the river at the end of a long pier and contracted pneumonia A lifelong resident of New York City, Long was educated in the New York City public school system. As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he dreamed of running "away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon." He developed his interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells as well as Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. Though writing was to be his life's work, he once commented that as "important as writing is, I could have been completely happy if I had a secure position in a field that has always had a tremendous emotion and an imaginative appeal for me—that of natural history." In his late teens, he was active in the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in which he won a prize from The Boy's World (around 1919) and thus discovered amateur journalism. His first published tale was "Dr Whitlock's Price (United Amateur, March 1920). Long's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" (1921), a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe, in UAPA, caught the eye of H. P. Lovecraft, sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937. Long attended New York University from 1920 to 1921, studying journalism but later transferred to Columbia, leaving without a degree. In 1921, he suffered a severe attack of appendicitis, leading to a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He spent a month in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, where he came close to dying. Long's brush with death propelled him into a decision that he would leave college to pursue a freelance writing career. Early career: the 1920s In 1924, at the age of 22, he sold his first short story, "The Desert Lich", to Weird Tales magazine. Throughout the next four decades, Long was to be a frequent contributor to pulp magazines, including two of the most famous: Weird Tales (under editor Farnsworth Wright) and Astounding Science Fiction (under editor John W. Campbell). Long was an active freelance writer, also publishing many non-fiction articles. His first book, the scarce volume A Man from Genoa and Other Poems, was published in 1926 by W. Paul Cook. Two copies are held in the collections of John Hay Library. The poems in this collection won praise from a great variety of writers, among them Arthur Machen, Robinson Jeffers, William Ellery Leonard, John Drinkwater, John Masefield and George Sterling. Samuel Loveman declared that Long's poem "The Marriage of Sir John de Mandeville" was worthy of Christopher Marlowe. Long's closest friends (apart from H. P. Lovecraft) in this period included Samuel Loveman, H. Warner Munn, and James F. Morton. He had several encounters with Hart Crane, who lived one flight above Loveman in Brooklyn Heights. 1930s "The Horror from the Hills", a story serialised in 1931 in Weird Tales, incorporated almost verbatim a dream H. P. Lovecraft related to him (among other correspondents) in a letter. The short novel was published many years later in separate book form by Arkham House in 1963, as The Horror from the Hills. In the late 1930s, Long turned his hand to science fiction, writing for Astounding Science Fiction. He also contributed horror stories to Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds). Long contributed an episode (along with C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft) to the round-robin story "The Challenge from Beyond" (1935). Like The Man from Genoa and Other Poems, his second book is a volume of fantastic verse: The Goblin Tower (1935), published jointly by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert H. Barlow under Barlow's The Dragonfly Press imprint. (A variant edition of this volume was published in 1945 by New Collectors Group - see Bibliography). Published in an edition of only 100 copies, this volume is exceedingly scarce; two copies are held at the collections of the John Hay Library. 1940s In pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories during the 1940s, Long sometimes wrote using the pseudonym "Leslie Northern". What Long characterized as a "minor disability" kept him out of World War II and writing full-time during the early 1940s. Long reportedly ghost-wrote two, possibly three, of the Ellery Queen Jr novels (mentioned in correspondence with August Derleth) but did not identify the titles. It is believed that the two are The Black Dog Mystery (1941) and The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942). The third may have been The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly, which was never published. (This volume is mentioned as Long's on the rear panel of The Horror from the Hills and on the rear flap of The Rim of the Unknown). He wrote comic books in the 1940s, including horror stories for Adventures Into the Unknown (ACG). Long contributed several original scripts to this comic's early issues, as well as an adaptation of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. He authored scripts for Planet Comics, Superman, Congo Bill, DC's Golden Age Green Lantern, and the Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel. He worked in the 1940s as a script-reader for Twentieth Century Fox Long wrote crime and weird menace stories for Ten Gang Mystery and other magazines. During the 1940s, Long lived for a period in California. Long credited Theodore Sturgeon, whom he met several times in the mid-1940s, as being instrumental in getting one of his middle-period stories, "A Guest in the House", produced on CBS-TV in 1954. In 1946, Arkham House published Long's first collection of supernatural fiction, The Hounds of Tindalos, which collected 21 of his best tales from the previous twenty years of magazine publication. It featured works which had appeared in such pulps as Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, Super Science Stories, Unknown, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction, Startling Stories, an.... Discover the Frank Belknap Long popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Frank Belknap Long books.