Edgar Lloyd Hampton (1872-1951)

Editor, Publisher, Journalist, Author, Poet
Born June 25, 1872, Iowa
Died September 22, 1951, Los Angeles, California

Edgar Lloyd Hampton was born on June 25, 1872, in Iowa, but he lived most of his life on the West Coast. The 1893 catalogue of Pacific College, in Newberg, Oregon, lists a student named Edgar L. Hampton of Dundee, Oregon. Whether that was our Edgar or not, Hampton was in Seattle by 1900, working as a newspaperman. Hampton remained in that city for at least ten years, publishing and editing the Seattle Saturday Mail (ca. 1900) and working, possibly as editor, on the Seattle Mail and Herald (to 1904). In 1904, he purchased the weekly Commonwealth and began as editor on a journal called The Westerner, An Interpretation of the West. His associate editor was poet Ella Higginson (1861-1940).

By 1920, Hampton was in Los Angeles, and he appears to have lived in southern California for the rest of his life. He took a special interest in this rapidly growing region and wrote articles for a number of publications, listed below. Hampton was also an author of short stories, serials, and poems. Those, too, are listed below.

Articles

• "With the Publishers" in The Westerner, Apr. 1909 and Nov. 1909
• "They Made Us Strike" in The Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 12, 1919
• "The Case for Boulder Dam" in American Review of Reviews, Dec. 1922
• "Cheap Power As a City Developer" in SCB [sic], May 1923
• "Los Angeles, a Miracle City" in Current History, Apr. 1926
• "Los Angeles as an American Art Centre" in Current History, Sept. 1926
• "Transporting a River Over Mountains" in Scientific American, Apr. 1, 1927
• "The Open Shop Movement as an Aid to Prosperity" in Industrial Digest, Sept. 1928
• "Curses on Our Climate" in Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 1932

Stories and Poems

• "A Measure of Wheat" in The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 10, 1903
• "The Law Breakers" in Tulsa Daily World, Dec. 27, 1914
• "The Outlaw" in Collier's, May 1, 1915
• "Skippy Limited" in The American Magazine, Oct. 1915
• "The Peace Call" (poem) in The Century, Mar. 1919
• "Seeing Faces" in Detective Story Magazine, Sept. 16, 1919
• "The Return of Foo Chow" in Metropolitan Magazine, Mar. 1920; reprinted in The Golden Book, Jan. 1928
• "The Rolling Stone" in Sunset, The Pacific Monthly, Nov. 1920
• "The Wind in the South" (serial) in McClure's, May 1921
• "The Old Burying Ground" in Weird Tales, Sept. 1923
• "Vanishing Fractions" in Argosy All-Story Weekly, Apr. 3, 1926

Hampton was the editor of at least one book, Then and Now: 100 Landmarks Within 50 Miles of Los Angeles Civic Center with compiler Mrs. A.S.C. Forbes (1939).

Edgar Lloyd Hampton died on September 22, 1951, in Los Angeles, and was buried at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Sylmar, California.

Edgar Lloyd Hampton's Story in Weird Tales

"The Old Burying Ground" (Sept. 1923)

Further Reading

None known.

A photograph and biographical snippet from Sunset, The Pacific Monthly, November 1920.

Then and Now: 100 Landmarks within 50 Miles of Los Angeles Civic Center, edited by Hampton (1939).

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley