Edgar Hoffmann Price | |
|---|---|
 E. Hoffmann Price - Fantasy Faire 10 - July 1980 Travel Lodge by LAX | |
| Born | (1898-07-03)July 3, 1898 Fowler, California |
| Died | June 18, 1988(1988-06-18) (aged 89) Redwood City, California |
| Pen name | E. Hoffman Price, Hamlin Daly |
| Occupation | Author |
| Genre | Fantasy |
Edgar Hoffmann Trooper Price (July 3, 1898 – June 18, 1988) was anAmerican writer of popular fiction (he was a self-titled "fictioneer") for thepulp magazine marketplace.[1] He collaborated withH. P. Lovecraft on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
Price was born atFowler, California. During his early years, he became interested in China as a result of his interactions with a Chinese salesman in his hometown. As a form of punishment, his mother once threatened to leave Price with him. He did not see this as a punishment. His interest in China also had asexual aspect. His wife later noted that "Oriental women fascinate [him]".[2]
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Prices served with the American military inMexico and thePhilippines, before being sent toFrance with theAmerican Expeditionary Force inFrance duringWorld War I earlier.[2][3] He was a champion fencer and boxer, an amateurOrientalist, and a student of theArabic language; science-fiction authorJack Williamson, in his 1984 autobiographyWonder's Child, called E. Hoffmann Price a "real live soldier of fortune".[1]
Originally intending to be a career soldier, Price graduated from theUnited States Military Academy atWest Point in 1923. Starting in 1924, Price took a job with Union Carbide at a plant outside New Orleans.[4] He purchased a typewriter and in his spare time started to write stories. After numerous rejections, he sold his first piece, “Triangle with Variations,” to the magazineDroll Stories in 1924, followed almost immediately by the first of scores of acceptances byWeird Tales, "The Rajah's Gift" (January 1925).[1][2]
In 1932 Price was fired from his Union Carbide job and turned to writing full time.[4] He moved to Manhattan and began to write extensively for pulp magazines.[2] In his literary career, Hoffmann Price produced fiction for a wide range of publications, fromArgosy toTerror Tales, fromSpeed Detective toSpicy Mystery Stories. Yet he was most readily identified as aWeird Tales writer, one of the group who wrote regularly for editorFarnsworth Wright, a group that included Lovecraft,Robert E. Howard, andClark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories inWeird Tales between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations withOtis Adelbert Kline, and his works with Lovecraft, noted above.
"The Stranger from Kurdistan", published in 1925, was another early story to appear inWeird Tales.[2] This story which featured a dialogue between a certain personage andSatan, was criticised by some readers as blasphemous but proved popular withWeird Tales readers. (Lovecraft professed to find it especially powerful). "The Infidel's Daughter" (1927), asatire on theKu Klux Klan, also angered some Southern readers, but Wright defended the story.[5]
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. Price also contributed to Farnsworth Wright's short-lived magazineThe Magic Carpet (1930–34), along with Kline, Howard, Smith, and otherWeird Tales regulars. ForSpicy Western Stories, Price wrote a series about a libidinous cowboy, Simon Bolivar Grimes.[1] ForClues Detective Stories, Price created a series centering on Pâwang Ali, a Malaysian detective in Singapore.[1]
Like many other pulp-fiction writers, Price could not support himself and his family on his income from literature. Living inNew Orleans in the 1930s, he worked for a time for theUnion Carbide Corporation. Nonetheless he managed to travel widely and maintain friendships with many other pulp writers, including Kline andEdmond Hamilton. On a trip to Texas in the mid-1930s, Price was the only pulp writer to meetRobert E. Howard face to face. He was also the only man known to have met Howard and alsoH. P. Lovecraft andClark Ashton Smith (the great "Triumvirate" ofWeird Tales writers) in person. Over the course of his long life, Price made reminiscences of many significant figures in pulp fiction, Howard, Lovecraft, and Hamilton among them.
By 1951, he was living inRedwood City, California. His interest in astrology led him to develop a connection with Sri Ram Mahra, a Tibetan theologian.[3]
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.[6] He also had published two collections of his pulp stories during his lifetime--Strange Gateways andFar Lands, Other Days. During this period, Price corresponded frequently with the novelist and poetRichard L. Tierney.
Price was one of the first speakers at San Francisco'sMaltese Falcon Society in 1981.
He received theWorld Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984.[7] A collection of his literary memoirs,Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear, Fictioneers & Others, was published posthumously in 2001. His writing friends and colleagues includedRichard L. Tierney,H. P. Lovecraft,August Derleth,Jack Williamson,Edmond Hamilton,Robert E. Howard,Clark Ashton Smith,Henry Kuttner,Seabury Quinn,Otis Adelbert Kline,Ralph Milne Farley,Robert Spencer Carr, andFarnsworth Wright among others.
Price was aBuddhist and a supporter of theRepublican Party.[8][2]
He died atRedwood City, California, in 1988.[9]
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. A disproven myth claims that Price took Lovecraft to a New Orleans brothel, where Lovecraft was amused to find that several of the employees there were fans of his work; the same apocryphal story was originally told aboutSeabury Quinn sometime earlier.[10]
The meeting of Price and Lovecraft began 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. They planned to use the pseudonym "Etienne Marmaduke de Marigny" for their collaborations; a similar name was used for a character in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", the only one of these collaborations to transpire[11] (though they had also collaborated on an earlier piece, the short tale "Tarbis of the Lake").
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" 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 forprotagonistRandolph Carter's doings after his disappearance."[12] After convincing an apparently reluctant Lovecraft 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,"[13] thoughAn H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia reports that Lovecraft "kept as many of Price's conceptions as possible, as well as some of his language."[14]
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."[15] The story appeared under both authors' bylines in the July 1934 issue ofWeird Tales; Price's draft was published as "The Lord of Illusion" inCrypt 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 somuch of it?"[14]
