100 Years of Amazing Stories

In April 1926, H.P. Lovecraft returned from Brooklyn to his Providence home. In New York, he had been an outsider. Once in Rhode Island again, he was an insider, at least in his own life and his own home. Weird Tales published "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926. Lovecraft could easily have read it on his train ride home. If he had, would he have seen any irony in his situation? After all, he had gone out into the world, just like his narrator, and now he was on his way home again. Except that he was happy.

I have written before about "The Outsider." I wrote then about Frankenstein's monster and Kaspar Hauser, two other outsiders who only wanted to be in. But they never could be. And now I think that Grendel could have been an outsider made bitter and murderous by his awareness of his situation. He was a march-stepper, a wanderer along borderlands, like Lovecraft. Could he have once seen himself in a mirror? Could that have driven him away to lurk in fen and fastness? Probably not, for Grendel was not a modern man.*

Lovecraft could have read another magazine on the way home that spring. That one was the first issue of Amazing Stories, published in New York City by Hugo Gernsback. Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted entirely to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that that's true. It would take a lot of reading through the first thirty issues of the magazine, published from March 1923 to March 1926, to find out whether it is so. But we can be sure that the first issue of Amazing Stories was full of fantasy and nothing else. It was the first fully science-fictional magazine in America. I wonder if Lovecraft read it at all. He must have. But how early in its history of publication?

Here are the contents of Amazing Stories #1, adapted from the Speculative Fiction Database:

• "A New Sort of Magazine," editorial by Hugo Gernsback
• "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac," part one of a two-part serial by Jules Verne (1877)
• "The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells (1901)
• "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker (1923)
• "The Thing from -- 'Outside'" by George Allan England (1923)
• "The Man Who Saved the Earth" by Austin Hall (1919)
• "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

All of these stories were reprints. Wells, Hall, and Poe also had stories in Weird Tales. Note that Hall's story is of "The Man Who . . ." type, while England's is of "The Thing . . ." type. England's story is also about "the outside," just as Lovecraft's story in Weird Tales that month was. I'm sure his was a different type of outside. The cover art and three interior illustrations of that inaugural issue were by Frank R. Paul. F.S. Hynd illustrated Poe's story.

Amazing Stories is still around, although it isn't currently in print but only on line. Unfortunately, it allows its contributors to use AI tools in the writing of their stories. I don't have to tell you that I hate AI in writing and art. Even so, I'll say: 

Happy 100th Anniversary to Amazing Stories!

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*There is another outsider who looks in on and raids the celebrations of men. He is the Grinch. Could his name and Grendel's have come from the same root? Most obviously: grin, from the Old English grennian, "to show the teeth (in pain or anger)," or the Old Norse grenja, "to howl."

Amazing Stories, April 1926, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. Those are skaters, I presume on one of the moons of Saturn. Have they arrived on sailing ships? Update (Apr. 2, 2026): Good old me, comment below, has pointed out that the illustration is for "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac" by Jules Verne. Thank you, Good old me.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley