Frank Belknap Long (April 27, 1901 - January 3, 1994) was a prolific 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 early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. 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 of America), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977). April 27 is the 117th day of the year (118th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 248 days remaining. ... 1901 (MCMI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Wednesday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... January 3 is the 3rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader. ... For other meanings see Fantasy (disambiguation) Fantasy is a genre of art, literature, film, television, and music that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of either plot, theme, setting, or all three. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... The corect pronunsiation of this word is PO-EM. Pohm is a coloquialism of the USA. Poetry (from Ancient Greek: (poiéo/poió) = I create) is traditionally a written art form (although there is also an ancient and modern poetry which relies mainly upon oral or pictorial representations) in which... The gothic novel is an English literary genre, which can be said to have been born with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. ... A comic book is a magazine or book containing the art form of comics. ... Cthulhu mythos (often capitalized: Cthulhu Mythos) is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and associated writers. ... This World Fantasy Award is presented to individuals for their outstanding service to the fantasy field, and decided by a panel of judges at the World Fantasy Convention. ... The Bram Stoker Award is a recognition presented by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for superior achievement in horror writing. ...

Biography

Frank Belknap Long was born in New York City in 1901, and grew up in the Harlem area of Manhattan. A lifelong resident of New York City, he 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." 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 an and imaginative appeal for me—that of natural history." Nickname: The Big Apple Official website: City of New York Government Counties (Boroughs) Bronx (The Bronx) New York (Manhattan) Queens (Queens) Kings (Brooklyn) Richmond (Staten Island) Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) Geographical characteristics Area Total 468. ... View of Harlem from Morningside Heights overlooking Morningside Park Lenox Avenue looking south from the corner of 124th Street. ... The Borough of Manhattan, highlighted in yellow, lies between the East River and the Hudson River. ...

In his late teens, he was active in the United Amateur Press Association. Long's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" (1921) in The United Amateur caught the eye of H.P. Lovecraft, sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, noted for combining these three genres within single narratives. ...

Long briefly attended New York University (from 1920 to 1921) where he studied journalism. However, 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. New York University (NYU) is a major research university in New York City. ...

In 1923, 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, A Man from Genoa and Other Poems, was published in 1926. This page is about the fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine and its heirs. ... Astounding Stories was a seminal science fiction magazine founded in 1930. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

What Long characterized as a "minor disability" kept him out of WWII and writing full time during the early 1940s. During the 1950s, Frank Belknap Long worked as an associate editor for Satellite Science Fiction, Short Story, and Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine. He also wrote comic books, including horror stories for Adventures Into the Unknown (ACG), and scripts for Superman, DC's Golden Age Green Lantern, and the Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel. Superman is a fictional character and superhero of DC Comics who first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and is considered the first character to embody the particular combination of traits that characterize the modern superhero. ... Cover to Green Lantern: Rebirth #6, art by Ethan Van Sciver. ... Captain Marvel, as a comic book character name, refers to one of several fictional characters, listed here in chronological order: Captain Marvel (DC Comics) is a superhero created by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker; a young boy named Billy Batson who transforms into a man empowered with attributes of...

Ever versatile as a writer, Long changed with the times. After the decline of the pulps, he moved into writing science fiction and gothic romance novels (and even a "Man from UNCLE" tie-in novel The Electronic Frankenstein Affair under the pen name of "Robert Hart Davis"). Long's gothic romance novels were written under the pseudonyms of "Lyda Belknap Long" (his wife's name) and "Leslie Northern." Long also published collections of his short stories (such as The Hounds of Tindalos and Night Fear) and poetry (including In Mayan Splendor), a biography of HP Lovecraft, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side, and his own Autobiographical Memoir (Necronomicon Press, 1986).

He married Lyda Arco in 1960. They stayed together till Long's death in 1994, but had no children. Though a writer of the fantastic, Long described himself as an "agnostic." He wrote that he "always shared HPL's [Howard Phillip Lovecraft] skepticism...concerning the entire range of alleged supernatural occurrences and what is commonly defined as 'the occult.'"

Long died on January 3, 1994 at the age of 92, survived by his wife, Lyda. He was buried in New York City's Woodlawn Cemetery. Despite a seven-decade career as a writer, he died impoverished; Long's fans contributed over $3000 to have his name engraved upon the tombstone of his family plot. Located in The Bronx, Woodlawn Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in New York City. ...

Frank Belknap Long left behind a body of work that included twenty-five novels, 150 short stories, eight collections of short stories, three poetry collections, and numerous freelance magazine articles and comic book scripts. Author Ray Bradbury summed up Long's career, "Frank Belknap Long has lived through a major part of science fiction history in the U.S., has known most of the writers personally, or has corresponded with them, and has, with his own writing, helped shape the field when most of us were still in our early teens." Ray Bradbury in 1945. ...

Friendship with Lovecraft

The Genius of Mr. Long is a spontaneous and self-expressive one.
—H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was a close friend and mentor to Frank Belknap Long. They saw each other regularly (especially during Lovecraft's residence in New York City from 1924-1926) and wrote to each other often. Long writes that he and Lovecraft exchanged "more than a thousand letters, not a few running to more than eighty handwritten pages" before Lovecraft's death in 1937. Some of their correspondence has been reprinted in Arkham House's Selected Letters series, collecting the voluminous correspondence of Lovecraft and his friends. Arkham House is a weird fiction specialty publishing house founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. ...

During the 1930s, Long and Lovecraft were both members of the Kalem Club (named for the initials of the surnames of original members--K, L, or M). Long was also part of the loosely associated "Lovecraft Circle" of fantasy writers (along with Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, and Donald Wandrei) who corresponded regularly with each other and influenced and critiqued each other's works. Robert Albert Bloch (April 5, 1917, Chicago, Illinois-September 23, 1994, Los Angeles) was a prolific Jewish-American writer. ... August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. ... Robert E. Howard Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was a writer of fantasy and historical adventure pulp stories published mainly in Weird Tales magazine in the 1930s. ... Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915 - February 4, 1958) was a science fiction author born in Los Angeles, California. ... Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893-August 14, 1961) was a poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. ... Donald Wandrei (1908 - 1987) was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. ...

The Long/Lovecraft friendship was fictionalized in Peter Cannon's 1985 novel Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club as if Narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

Long wrote a number of early Cthulhu Mythos stories. These included: "The Hounds of Tindalos" (the first Mythos story written by anyone other than Lovecraft), The Horror from the Hills (which introduced the elephantine Great Old One Chaugnar Faugn to the Mythos), and "The Space-Eaters" (featuring a fictionalized HPL as its main character). Cthulhu mythos (often capitalized: Cthulhu Mythos) is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and associated writers. ... The Hounds of Tindalos are a part of H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos. ... A Great Old One is a type of fictional deity in the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. ... The following compendium includes the lesser known Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. ...

The Hounds of Tindalos are Long's most famous fictional creation. The Hounds were a pack of foul and incomprehensibly alien beasts "emerging from strange angles in dim recesses of non-Euclidean space before the dawn of time" (Long) to pursue travelers down the corridors of time. They could only enter our reality via angles, where they would mangle and exsanguinate their victims, leaving behind only a "peculiar bluish pus or ichor" (Long). The Hounds of Tindalos have been used or referenced by many later Mythos writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, and Brian Lumley. Long's Hounds of Tindalos have also inspired a number of metal and electronic music artists, such as: Epoch of Unlight, Edith Byron's Group, Beowulf, Fireaxe/Brian Voth, and Univers Zero, all of whom have recorded tracks based upon the story. John Ramsey Campbell (born January 4, 1946 in Liverpool) is a British writer, who is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest masters of horror fiction. ... Linwood Vrooman Carter (June 9, 1930 - February 7, 1988) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor and critic. ... Brian Lumley (born December 12, 1937) is a writer of horror fiction. ...

Further reading

• Cannon, Peter, Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long, Stockport British Fantasy Society, 1997.

• Long, Frank Belknap, Autobiographical Memoir, Necronomicon Press, 1986.

• Long, Frank Belknap, The Early Long: the Hounds of Tindalos, Jove Books, 1978.

• Long, Frank Belknap, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side, Arkham House, 1975.

External links

• Frank Belknap Long Bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• Frank Belknap Long: Fantasist of Multiple Dimensions (biographical essay by Perry M. Grayson)

• Frank Belknap Long Bibliography (w Photo)

• "The Ultimate Cthulhu Mythos Book List" - Listing of all mythos novels, anthologies, collections, comic books, and more.