Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part One

Introduction

I first wrote about Earl Peirce, Jr., on May 17, 2017. I misidentified him then as Earl Monroe Pierce, Jr., based on his age and his residency in Washington, D.C., where Peirce/Pierce is known to have lived. A month later, an anonymous commenter let me know that I had the wrong person and provided a link to an online discussion about the right one. I removed what I had written and promised an update and correction. By then it was too late: my mistake was memorialized in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) and you can still find it there today. I pride myself on doing good work. It's not such a good feeling to do bad and to know that I have done bad. It's not a good feeling, either, to know that my mistake is flapping in the breeze of the worldwide web. I'm not a member of ISFDb and don't know anyone who is. I hope that once this new series is over, someone will let them know that the whole mess has been straightened out and that it's time to recognize the real Earl Peirce, Jr., for who he was.

The Peirces of Maine

One of the reasons I misidentified Earl Peirce, Jr., is that it just didn't seem to me that his surname was spelled correctly. We once had Franklin Pierce as president. We know Hawkeye Pierce as a fictional Korean War surgeon. (1) We even have Jeremy Duncan's pierced friend Pierce in the comic strip Zits. To complicate matters, Earl Peirce was also known as Earl Pierce. My mistake was in thinking that the correct spelling was a mistake and vice versa. (2) What I didn't know is that there are scads of Peirces who have called Maine home since the colonial era and that their numbers have included militia captains, wealthy lumbermen, a prominent artist, a well-known (in his time) archaeologist and art historian, and not one but two writers of genre fiction. Only one of them was Earl Peirce, Jr. I'll get to the other--his third cousin--before we reach the end of this series. 

To be continued . . .

The first story by Earl Peirce, Jr., to appear in Weird Tales was "Doom of the House of Duryea," in October 1936 (with cover art by J. Allen St. John). Peirce's byline wasn't on the cover, but his story has proved popular and enduring. It was reprinted in Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (1947), Far Below and Other Horrors (1974, 1987), Weird Vampire Tales (1992), and Bloodlines: Vampire Stories from New England (1997),  suggesting a New England origin for the writer himself . . .

"Doom of the House of Duryea" is also in Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001), in which Peirce's last name was misspelled (see, I'm not the only one to make that mistake) but which was graced by cover art by the late Gahan Wilson. (I apologize for the poor quality of the image: the Internet isn't everything it's cracked up to be.)

The main action in Peirce's story takes place in a cabin by a lake in northern Maine. If it is a Lovecraftian tale at all, it might be on account of a centuries-old family curse and secret knowledge drawn from obscure and forbidden books. Among the books mentioned are Episcopi (real), Nider's Ant-Hill (real, as Formicarius), and an unnamed work by Ludvig Prinn (not real). The last, De Vermis Mysteriis, was created by Robert Bloch as an addition to H.P. Lovecraft's list of grimoires, both real and not real.* Bloch was of course an acolyte of Lovecraft. Younger by a generation, he corresponded with Lovecraft, and together they wrote a series of back-and-forth stories in which they killed each other off. What is less well known is that Peirce also corresponded with Lovecraft and that he was friends with Bloch. At or about the time that "Doom of the House of Duryea" was published, Peirce was living in Bloch's hometown of Milwaukee. (Not long afterwards he moved to Washington, D.C., with his family.) I suppose that's why Peirce was called a "midwestern writer" in the introduction to his story in Weird Vampire Tales (1992).

Earl Peirce, Jr., seems to have been up on his lore. I had never heard of either Nider's Ant-Hill or Episcopi before reading his story. He also made a reference to an "Enoch" and "the terrible drawings by an ancient Dominican of Rome." I don't know and couldn't find for myself a reference for either. The word vrykolaka also appears in "Doom of the House of Duryea." That's not one you see very often in old weird fiction. There is also a word new to me--shocking and disturbing, too: INFANTIPHAGI. (Yes, it's in all upper case in the original.) That word may be new to everybody else who reads it, too, for it seems to have been Peirce's own neologism. Maybe he used it for shock effect, as young writers and artists often do with such things. It's still shocking to me, more than eighty years after he wrote it, but the shock effect can only wear in our current age: I'm not sure that Peirce could have known that we would one day, once again, worship Moloch. One thing to consider here: the eating of offspring by parents (filial cannibalism) and of the mother by her offspring (matriphagy) occur in nature. As a forester, Earl Peirce's namesake--his own father--might have known of such things, or maybe Peirce read of them in his father's library, just as the fictional son in "Doom of the House of Duryea" reads of them in his own father's reeking, mildewy, yellow book of horrors on that stormy and fateful night by the lake . . .

*De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn was first mentioned in "The Shambler from the Stars," published in Weird Tales in September 1935.

Notes

(1) Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr., better known by his nom de plume Richard Hooker, graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine and later practiced medicine in Waterville and Bremen. (Franklin Pierce graduated from Bowdoin, too.) Hornberger (1924-1997) served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and went on to write the original novel (1968) on which the movie and television show M*A*S*H* were based. I imagine he met more than one Peirce/Pierce during his decades in Maine. Maybe one of them provided him with the surname of his fictional counterpart. Hawkeye Pierce's real name, by the way, is Benjamin Franklin Pierce. Remember this: if you draw any line long enough it eventually becomes a circle. Here's another circle: Earl Peirce, Jr., came from a Maine family and died in New Jersey; Hornberger was born in New Jersey and died in Maine.

(2) The spellchecker in Blogger doesn't like the spelling Peirce, either.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gahan Wilson (1930-2019)

Cartoonist, Illustrator, Author, Editor, Essayist, Movie Reviewer, Book Critic, Screenwriter
Born February 18, 1930, Evanston, Illinois
Died November 21, 2019, Scottsdale, Arizona

Gahan Wilson had the last illustration in the last issue of the original Weird Tales and he was probably the last living artist to have contributed to that incarnation of the magazine. If you were making a list of the top two cartoonists of the macabre, the late Mr. Wilson would be on it. His accomplishments in the worlds of fantasy, horror, and science fiction were legion in a career that began in 1954 and ended only with his death late last year. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), his earliest genre credit was a cartoon for Fantastic in the issue of January/February 1954. His last were for books published in 2019. He was born dead or heavily anesthetized and brought back in time to escape being put into a box. His parents, Allen Barnum Wilson (1898-1980), a steel engineer, and Rose Marion (Gahan) Wilson (1895-1960), an artist and advertising copywriter, had a tumultuous marriage. The effects extended into the life of their only child. Each gave him a name, for its fullest form was Gahan Allen Wilson. His mother's family, the Gahans, were Irish. Their surname supposedly means "rocky field."

Gahan Wilson served in the U.S. Air Force and like his mother before him studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. When he told his father that he wanted to become a cartoonist, the elder Wilson said simply, "Good luck." It worked. Wilson was more than a cartoonist, though. He reviewed books for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1968 to 1976 and for Realms of Fantasy from 1994 to 2006. He also reviewed movies for The Twilight Zone Magazine from 1981 to 1989. He designed the World Fantasy Award trophy in the likeness of H.P. Lovecraft. The trophy was in use from 1975 until 2015 when it was deemed too offensive to feeble sensibilities. He won the World Fantasy Special Convention Award in 1981, Best Artist Award in 1996, and the Life Achievement Award in 2004. The first illustrations I ever saw by Gahan Wilson were probably for Jerome Beatty's Matthew Looney series of children's novels. Matthew Looney's Voyage to the Earth (1961) may have been the first science fiction book I ever read. That was in fourth grade. My friend and classmate Matt C. introduced me to it. I'd like to say thanks, Matt. Thanks, too, to Jerome Beatty, Jr., and Gahan Wilson.

Gahan Wilson married Nancy Dee Midyette Winters Hurwitz in December 1966 in Broward County, Florida. Born on November 24, 1931, in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the Academy of St. Joseph and Scarsdale High School in New York and Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts. She was a writer, too, and had an early short story, "The Sea Shells," in All Manner of Men: Representative Fiction from the American Catholic Press, in 1956. Assuming I have the right person--she wrote under the pen name Nancy Winters--her other works include: Feasting Afloat (1972), The Girl on the Coca-cola Tray (1977), There's No Place Like the Ritz (1988), and Man Flies: The Story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, Master of the Balloon, Conqueror of the Air (1998). I think there were others. I'd like to have a fuller list of her credits. Nancy Winters also wrote syndicated newspaper articles for Women's News Service and was travel editor for Boston magazine.

Gahan Wilson was devoted to his wife, even if they lived separately for long periods of time. After fifty-two years of marriage, she died on March 2, 2019. He survived her by nine months and died just three days before her birthday, on November 21, 2019. He was eighty-nine years old.

Gahan Wilson's Illustrations for Weird Tales (Original run)
Illustration for "Prediction" by Curtis W. Casewit (May 1954)
Illustration for "This Night" by Dorothy Quick (Sept. 1954)

Further Reading

"Gahan Wilson and the Comedy of the Weird" by Richard Gehr in The Comics Journal, Apr. 27, 2011, here.

"Gahan Wilson, Vividly Macabre Cartoonist, Dies at 89" by Neil Genzlinger, the New York Times, Nov. 22, 2019, here.

"Gahan Wilson (1930-2019)" on the website of Locus, Nov. 23, 2019, here. There is supposed to be a fuller tribute to Wilson in the January 2020 issue of Locus.

Gahan Wilson's illustration for "This Night" by Dorothy Quick from Weird Tales, September 1954. It was the last original illustration to appear in the original run of "The Unique Magazine." The artist was twenty-three years old when it appeared.

Wilson designed the World Fantasy Award trophy in the image of H.P. Lovecraft. The design was in use from 1975 to 2015. Sorry, people, no trigger warnings here. Look upon this image and weep for all the racism it represents.

Gahan Wilson married Nancy Dee Midyette Winters Gurwitz in December 1966. Here is her yearbook photo from Scarsdale High School, New York, 1949. Even then she was an "aspiring author."

Nancy Wilson went by the pen name Nancy Winters. She was married before and, through her, Gahan Wilson had two stepsons. She died in early 2019. Her husband followed in the latter part of the year. Here they are in happier times, 1972. Is it any wonder that we loved the 1970s?

Gahan Wilson had two heroes, H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Addams. Here is his tribute to Lovecraft on the cover of The Twilight Zone Magazine, August 1985. Wilson's drawing--the part on the left--looks like a self-portrait. It would have come when role-playing games were popular, hence the dice (I guess).

Wilson had just one cover for Weird Tales, for the Spring issue of 1991, illustrating Robert Bloch. This cover joins Virgil Finlay's cover of September 1939 as another illustrating an author of fantasy and the macabre.

I am remembering some of the events of 2019, but even without my meager remembrance of him (in his birthday month by the way), we would never have forgotten Gahan Wilson. We send our condolences to his family for the loss in one year of two parents. I lament the loss of all of those fine years, too.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981)-Part Seven

Karl Edward Wagner remembered:

The story ["Sticks"] is really Lee Brown Coye's and is about Lee Brown Coye, as the Afterword [in Whispers #3] explains. Coye had described the events upon which "Sticks" was based to me, and when Stuart David Schiff decided to bring out a special Lee Brown Coye issue of Whispers, I stole time from my final few months of medical school to write a story inspired by Coye’s experiences. "Sticks" is shot through with in-jokes and references which the serious fantasy/horror fan will recognize. I wrote the story as a favour (1) and tribute to Lee, and I never expected it to be read by anyone beyond the thousand or so fans who read Whispers. To my surprise, "Sticks" became one of my best known and best liked stories. It won the British Fantasy Award and was a runner-up in the World Fantasy Award for best short fiction. The story has been anthologized numerous times and translated into several languages. It was broadcast on National Public Radio on Hallowe'en 1982 and was to have been produced for the short lived television series, Darkroom. Not bad for an in-joke. (2)

Not long after the Lee Brown Coye issue of Whispers was published (in March 1974), Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake made the thirteen-hour drive from North Carolina to Hamilton, New York, to visit with Coye in his studio. Wagner described the sixty-six-year-old artist: "Coye [looked] like one of his own creations, long-bodied; cadaverously thin; brush of age-bleached hair that still showed traces of red; bright, lively eyes . . . ." (3) Eleven years before, in June 1963, Coye and two friends, John Vetter and Art Meggett, had gone looking for the Mann Brook site. In this June of 1974, Coye made a second expedition with Wagner and Drake. According to Coye's biographer, the trio of explorers found that the site had been "completely replaced with fresh forest and was now strewn with 'no trespassing for any purposes' signs." (4) The men turned back, instead visiting a local cemetery.

* * *

Coye received his copy of Worse Things Waiting, the first book published under Wagner and Drake's Carcosa imprint, towards the end of the year. At the first World Fantasy Awards (5), Wagner, Coye, Manly Wade Wellman, and Stuart David Schiff won a triple crown:

• Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman, illustrated by Lee Brown Coye, and published by Carcosa, won for best anthology/collection;
• Lee Brown Coye won for best artist; and
• Whispers, edited and published by Stuart David Schiff, won the special award in the "non-professional" category, no doubt in part for its Lee Brown Coye issue of March 1974.

In addition, "Sticks," written by Karl Edward Wagner, based on Coye's experience, and published in Whispers, was nominated for best short fiction. (The award went to "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" by Robert Aikman.)

* * *

Then in his sixties, Lee Brown Coye continued creating illustrations for small press, fanzines, and Whispers. In 1976, Scribner's issued Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre. Coye provided the illustrations for this oversized anthology, edited by Les Daniels. One of Coye's drawings for Weird Tales also appeared in Daniels' book Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Scribner's, 1975).

In January 1977, Coye had a stroke and fell into a coma. Over the course of a year, he rallied and was able to draw again. In summer, Carcosa came out with Murgunstrumm & Others by Hugh B. Cave. That book won the award for best anthology/collection at the 1978 World Fantasy Awards. Once again, Lee Brown Coye was named best artist. Karl Edward Wagner was among the judges that year.

Coye's health continued to deteriorate. He had a heart attack in February and again in September 1981. The second one proved fatal, thus Lee Brown Coye died on September 5, 1981, at age seventy-four. His last original art was published in the fanzine Sorcerer's Apprentice in the year of his death. Karl Edward Wagner survived him, but was probably on a downward trajectory by then. His appetites caught up with him in the end, which came on October 14, 1994. Wagner was just forty-eight years old.

Next: Lee Brown Coye in "Sticks"

Notes

(1) Note Wagner's use of the British spelling, à la H.P. Lovecraft.

(2) Quoted in "The Terror of the Absurd: Karl Edward Wagner's 'Sticks'" by Al Harron, from the website The Cimmerian, October 13, 2009.

(3) Quoted in Arts Unknown: The Life and Art of Lee Brown Coye by Luis Ortiz (2005), p. 149.

(4) Ditto.

(5) Held in Providence, Rhode Island, October 31-November 2, 1975. Providence was, of course, H.P. Lovecraft's native city.

The World Fantasy Award, since 1975, presented annually at the World Fantasy Convention. Lee Brown Coye won two of these awards near the end of his life, for best artist in 1975 and 1978. Designed by the cartoonist (and last Weird Tales artist) Gahan Wilson, it of course depicts H.P. Lovecraft. Some have called it hideous. They sound like Lovecraft's mother, who helped ruin her son by calling him "ugly" (thereby providing the rest of us with nearly a century of entertainment in his work). I have read some of the suggestions for replacing Lovecraft's visage: a dragon, the One Ring, a wizard's hat, a unicorn. If it's a unicorn, I hope it's one with soft, big, brown, eyes and a long flowing mane and tail, preferably pink or purple, that you can comb. And a rainbow in the background!

The objection to the World Fantasy Award isn't really to the ugliness of the statuette. It's to the man whom it represents. I wrote last year about the idea that science fiction could be dying, if it isn't already dead. One possible cause for the moribund state of the genre is a plague of political correctness, a disease that always proves fatal. It's one thing for political correctness to infect science fiction. After all, science fiction, being about the future, and, at its extremes, about a perfectly ordered future, has a hard time separating itself from things political. But now the disease of political correctness appears to have passed to fantasy, a genre that is ordinarily far less political, and very often not political at all. Moreover, fantasy is often about freedom, the antithesis of the dystopia that the politically correct wish to impose upon all of us.

The controversy over the Lovecraft statuette has to do with the author's supposed racism. There is no question that Lovecraft wrote some pretty disagreeable things in his stories. There can't be any excusing those things. But the people who object so strongly to him and his work should look a little more deeply into the human psyche before spouting off. H.P. Lovecraft was a recluse and a pauper. His father more or less abandoned him. His mother called him ugly and in her neurosis clung to him. If he was not mentally ill, Lovecraft was deeply troubled, emotionally and psychologically (though his mental state improved later in life). He very seldom held a real job and was barely able to function in the real world. Although he married, he also abandoned his marriage and died childless, essentially of malnutrition. In short, Lovecraft was a man who lived in a kind of desperation; he was a man without power. In their desperation, people who are abandoned or improperly loved by their parents--who are unable to function in the world--who feel powerless, angry, fearful, or lonely--often lash out. Being or feeling powerless themselves, they tend to pick on those who are either far more powerful than they are (believing those people to be the cause of their problems) or who are weaker than they are, the way some people abuse or mistreat children, animals, and waitresses. H.P. Lovecraft may or may not have been racist. But to impute the power of the racist to him is silly. To believe that he was animated or motivated by racism is to misinterpret his life to the point of incompetence.*

One author has called Lovecraft "a malevolent clown." Well, that "clown" helped create and was the leading theorist of a genre--weird fiction--that is perhaps more popular now than ever. That "clown" created something August Derleth fashioned into "the Cthulhu Mythos," one of the most successful works of the imagination to come out of twentieth-century literature. That "clown" is acknowledged as second only to Edgar Allan Poe in his field. He has countless fans, admirers, and followers. His work has been taken up by prominent and successful authors. His stories have been adapted to movies, television, radio, spoken-word records, comic books, and games. And he has a major award (in the words of Ralphie Parker's Old Man) cast in his image. Scores of writers, artists, editors, and publishers have accepted that award over the past forty years without protest. I doubt that so many people are so willing to overlook the sins of a racist or of racism in general. In any case, S.T. Joshi has addressed the controversy far more cogently than I on his blog, called, accurately enough, S.T. Joshi's Blog, at the following URL:

http://stjoshi.org/news2014.html

My hope is that the disease of political correctness infecting not just literature but all of society recedes so that we might all enjoy once again a healthier condition.

-----

*Much of the evidence for Lovecraft's supposed racism rests on his story "The Horror at Red Hook," composed when Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn. There is real ugliness in the story to be sure, but it's clear to me that "The Horror at Red Hook" is an expression of extreme desperation and probably also of loneliness, fear, anger, and homesickness.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)-Part 1

Soldier, Journalist, Author, Fabulist, Critic, Satirist

Born June 24, 1842, Along Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio

Died Date and place unknown, presumably in Mexico in late 1913 or 1914

The life of Ambrose Bierce is bracketed in mysteries, for no one knows where he was born (precisely) nor where or when he died. He was at once a realist and a fantasist, states of mind combined nowhere else as in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." From a life of horror, bitterness, and tragedy, Bierce forged lasting works of art and fierce humor. He contributed equally to journalism, composition and usage, satire, naturalistic fiction, and--conversely--stories of the supernatural. His book, The Cynic's Word Book, better known as The Devil's Dictionary (1906), is an indispensable work, especially in the current age of prickly feelings and political correctness. In this election season, it's edifying and enlightening to read a few definitions from Bierce's book:

CAPITAL, n. The seat of misgovernment.

DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.

PLATITUDE, n. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard.

POLITICS, n. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

TWICE, adv. Once too often.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

WALL STREET, n. A symbol of sin for every devil to rebuke.

The critic Carey McWilliams made his case for Bierce with these words: 

[H]e wrote a half dozen of the finest American short stories, a dozen or so of the most memorable letters and battle pieces, some of the best American satiric verse and . . . he was the greatest American satirist in the classic tradition.

Kurt Vonnegut (another Hoosier) had this to say:

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce.

Part Edgar Allan Poe, part Stephen Crane, part O. Henry, part H.L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce was wholly himself, an American original and an uncategorizable author.

 * * *

Weird Tales published just one work by Bierce. It's called "The Damned Thing," and it appeared in the first year "The Unique Magazine" was in print. It would be wholly inaccurate to say Bierce was only a peripheral figure in the history and development of weird fiction however. Before getting to the main point, we should note that Bierce was separated from Clark Ashton Smith by a single generation of poets, for Bierce was a mentor to George Sterling (1869-1926), the California poet and San Francisco bohemian who was himself a mentor to Smith (1893-1961). I wonder if Sterling's suicide in 1926 could have been a prod to Clark Ashton Smith, for most of his submissions to Weird Tales came after that date. In any case, Smith distinguished himself among contributors to "The Unique Magazine" with his scores of fantastic poems and stories.

As another sidelight, consider the case of Adolphe de Castro (1859-1959), aka Adolphe Danziger (and other aliases). A Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1883, Danziger was at various times a rabbi, dentist, journalist, teacher, publisher, lawyer, and diplomat. Like George Sterling, he sought the advice and guidance of Ambrose Bierce while living in San Francisco. The two men even formed a publishing partnership and collaborated on the story "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter." Well after Bierce's disappearance and presumed death, Danziger approached H.P. Lovecraft with a planned memoir on the departed author. After some delay and with some revisions and other work by Lovecraft and his friend Frank Belknap Long, Danziger published his Portrait of Ambrose Bierce in 1929. Reviews were mixed. Nonetheless, Danziger, as Adolphe de Castro, also collaborated with Lovecraft on two stories for Weird Tales, "The Last Test" (Nov. 1928) and "The Electric Executioner" (Aug. 1930). I should add that the collaboration seems to have been no such thing: Lovecraft simply reworked de Castro's ideas, effectively functioning as a ghostwriter. You can read more about the whole affair in an article entitled "The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro" by Chris Powell, here, and in L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (1976).

To be continued . . .

Ambrose Bierce's Story in Weird Tales

"The Damned Thing" (Sept. 1923)

Further Reading

A simple search of the Internet will turn up a lot on Ambrose Bierce. A trip to a university library would likely keep you busy all day.

The Classics Illustrated line adapted the work of Ambrose Bierce to the comic book format. The art is by Gahan Wilson, an artist of the macabre and the author of the last illustration to appear in the original Weird Tales magazine.

Bierce was also the author of Fantastic Fables, published in 1899, the same year in which George Ade published his famous Fables in Slang. The fable of course is an ancient form, but the form lent itself to twentieth century practitioners such as James Thurber, George Orwell, Don Marquis, and Franz Kafka.

Here is the dust cover for a Caedmon Record of David McCallum reading "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Damned Thing." Thanks to Garrick for the image.

Ambrose Bierce and Adolphe de Castro collaborated on an adaptation of the story "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter." De Castro went on to publish a memoir of his relationship with Bierce and to collaborate with H.P. Lovecraft on two stories for Weird Tales.

Those two stories--"The Last Test" and "The Electric Executioner"--appeared in book form in The Horror in the Museum. Here's a paperback version, a British edition that may or may not contain all the tales from the original Arkham House edition. Can anyone attest to its contents? And does anyone know the name of the cover artist?

A stamp with a portrait of Ambrose Bierce, described as "immensely attractive . . . handsome, debonair, erect, and in the habit of looking out and over life, so to speak, as from an eminence."

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Author, Poet, Essayist, Critic, Editor
Born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts
Died October 7, 1849, Baltimore, Maryland

If we tell a story of an author who wrote tales of mystery, crime, horror, and science fiction for popular magazines; a man who--wandering from city to city--struggled to find work and to win recognition (and remuneration) for his writing; an orphan and an alcoholic who was disowned by his family and endured other losses and tragedies, finally to die in poverty, you might guess that he was a pulp fiction writer of the 1920s and '30s. Instead, you would be reading something of the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

The facts of Poe's life are well known and can be found in any number of sources. He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, child and orphan of two actors. Raised by a wealthy Southerner (from whom he took the name Allan), Poe was educated in Great Britain and in the South. Although he attended the University of Virginia and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he never completed his degree. Instead, Poe served successfully as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army and worked as a writer, editor, and critic for a number of magazines and newspapers, including the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Graham's Magazine. Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but died childless. His legacy was instead his very influential oeuvre of fiction and verse.

Edgar Allan Poe was among the first American authors to attempt to support themselves solely by their writing. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in 1827 when its author was still in his teens. It came and went without notice. "MS. Found in a Bottle," from 1833, won him a prize from a Baltimore newspaper and a position as assistant editor at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. From there, Poe's career was more assured and stable, though personal problems and the death of his wife took their toll. Poe died mysteriously in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. In the centennial year of Poe's death, the mysterious "Poe Toaster" began his annual visit to the author's grave. The ritual ended with the bicentennial of Poe's birth.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most well known and influential American authors of the nineteenth century. He is credited with having created the genre of detective fiction and as one of the originators of the genre of science fiction. As such, his work was a forerunner to two of the most popular categories of pulp fiction. (If Poe's work led to twentieth century detective fiction and science fiction, it must also have led to the two most popular types of comic book superheroes, the detective hero--e.g., Batman--and the science-fictional hero--e.g., Superman. Only the mythological hero, the magical hero, and the supernatural hero would have predated Poe and his time.) Jacob Clark Henneberger, founder of Weird Tales magazine, was a particular admirer of Edgar Allan Poe. In the magazine to which he was so devoted, Henneberger attempted to revive the effect and spirit of Poe's tales of mystery and terror. In the early essay, "Why Weird Tales?" (Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924), Henneberger's editorial staff recognized their debt and obligation to Poe, writing, "Had Edgar Allan Poe produced that masterpiece [The Murders in the Rue Morgue] in this generation he would have searched in vain for a publisher before the advent of this magazine." The closing of the essay begins with these prescient words:

[Poe's] works are immortal and stand today as the most widely read of any American author. The publishers of Weird Tales hope they will be instrumental in discovering or uncovering some American writer who will leave to posterity what Poe and Hawthorne have bequeathed to the present generation.

Perhaps unknowingly, the magazine had already begun publishing the work of that writer and a worthy successor to Edgar Allan Poe, for in its October 1923 issue, Weird Tales had printed the first of many tales by another New Englander who struggled to make his living as a writer, a man who endured his own personal problems, yet triumphed in his art, only to die tragically young like Edgar Allan Poe. That writer and Poe's successor was Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Works by Edgar Allan Poe, published in his lifetime:

Tamerlane and Other Poems (as by "a Bostonian") (1827)

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829)

Poems (1831)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839)

The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (1843)

Tales (1845)

The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Edgar Allan Poe's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (June 1923)

"The Pit and the Pendulum" (Oct. 1923)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (Nov. 1923)

"The Black Cat" (Jan. 1924)

"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (Mar. 1924)

"The Conqueror Worm" (poem, Nov. 1925)

"The Haunted Palace" (poem, Dec. 1925)

"Lenore" (poem, Jan. 1926)

"The Masque of the Red Death" (Mar. 1926)

"Eldorado" (poem, Sept. 1926)

"Ligeia" (Nov. 1926)

"The Thousandth and Second Tale" (Nov. 1927)

"Metzengerstein" (Jan. 1928)

"A Descent into the Maelstrom" (Jan. 1930)

"Berenice" (Apr. 1932)

"The Premature Burial" (Nov. 1933)

"William Wilson" (Nov. 1935)

"Israfel" (poem, Sept. 1938, one of Virgil Finlay's poetry series)

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (Aug. 1939)

"The Raven" (poem, Sept. 1939, one of Virgil Finlay's poetry series)

"Lenore" (poem, Mar. 1940, one of Virgil Finlay's poetry series)

In all, Weird Tales reprinted twenty poems and stories by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first. The illustration is by the incomparable Harry Clarke (1889-1931), the artist most closely associated with Poe's work. 

Born in Ireland, Clarke worked as an illustrator and stained-glass artist. His black and white illustrations are well known and often reprinted. His work in color is less well known. Here is a color illustration for "The Tell-Tale Heart." The pose of the murderer here is strikingly similar to that of the razor-wielding orangutan in the previous picture. Clarke's technique imbues his color illustration with the luminosity of stained glass.

"The Premature Burial," a truly terrifying image by Clarke. 

Another color image by Clarke. I'm afraid I don't know the title of the story. Can anyone help? 

Clarke was influenced by art nouveau, as in this illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death," but his work was his own. Working in his native Ireland, he may have been on the fringes of European art movements, thus free to develop as he would.

Another illustration for an unknown story. I have included it here because it is such a striking departure from Clarke's other illustrations and because it presages Lovecraftian horrors to come.

Finally, Clarke's drawing for "The Fall of the House of Usher," the last story by Poe to appear in Weird Tales.

Harry Clarke's work never appeared in Weird Tales. Gahan Wilson on the other hand was the last artist to see his work printed in the pages of "The Unique Magazine." Here is Mr. Wilson's cover for the Classics Illustrated version of "The Raven and Other Poems." 

Mr. Wilson also created this cover for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (Aug. 1985), portraying monsters from the imagination of H.P. Lovecraft, a writer who--more than any other--can be considered an equal to Poe.

September 1939--World War II began and the image of Edgar Allan Poe appeared on the cover of Weird Tales magazine. He may have been the only author so honored. The artist was Virgil Finlay. Update (July 8, 2015): Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok also appeared on the cover of Weird Tales, but not as themselves as authors. Instead, they drew anonymous self-portraits as part of their respective cover illustrations.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gahan Wilson (b. 1930)

Cartoonist, Illustrator, Author

Born October 18, 1930, Evanston, Illinois

The last illustration in the last issue of Weird Tales (September 1954) was by Gahan Wilson, then just twenty-three and at the beginning of his long career as an artist of the macabre. Born blue and breathless, Gahan Allen Wilson was shocked into life by an alert physician. Raised an atheist by his Catholic mother, Wilson went to the Art Institute of Chicago as she would have liked to do. P.T. Barnum and William Jennings Bryan were relatives, helping to make his family an unusual milieu. It's no wonder that he draws weird, creepy, strange, and demented cartoons. What counts is that they're also funny.

Over the course of his career, Gahan Wilson has drawn cartoons for Playboy, The New Yorker, Collier's, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and National Lampoon. He has also authored and illustrated several books. Fantagraphics Books has recently published a number of collections of his work. Mr. Wilson is well known for his cartoons for Playboy. What is less well known is that Hugh Hefner, co-founder and editor-in-chief, was also a reader of Weird Tales.

Gahan Wilson's Illustrations in Weird Tales

"The Night" by Dorothy Quick (Sept. 1954)

Further Reading

See "Gahan Wilson and the Comedy of the Weird," an interview by Richard Gehr, in The Comics Journal on line, April 27, 2011, at:

http://www.tcj.com/gahan-wilson/

See also the official Gahan Wilson website at: http://www.gahanwilson.com/.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley