Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long was an influential American writer born on April 27, 1903, in New York City, who made significant contributions to the genres of horror and science fiction. Growing up in Harlem and educated in the New York public school system, he attended New York University, where he initially studied journalism and developed an interest in biology. Long began his writing career in the early 1920s, publishing his first horror story, "The Eye Above the Mantel," after joining the United Amateur Press Association, which caught the attention of the renowned writer H. P. Lovecraft.
Long's literary career flourished with the sale of his first story to the iconic magazine Weird Tales in 1923. He became part of Lovecraft's literary circle and is known for integrating elements of the "Cthulhu Mythos" into his own works, notably in his book "The Hounds of Tindalos." Over his career, Long published numerous short stories, novels, and poetry collections, and ventured into editing and comic book writing. He received multiple accolades throughout his life, including the Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement. Long continued to write until the late 1980s, leaving a lasting legacy in the realms of speculative fiction before his passing on January 3, 1994, in New York City.
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Frank Belknap Long
Author
- Born: April 27, 1903
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 3, 1994
Biography
Frank Belknap Long was born on April 27, 1903, in New York City, and grew up in Harlem. Educated in the New York public school system, he matriculated to New York University in 1920, where he studied journalism, although he also developed an interest in biology. Joining the United Amateur Press Association, Long began writing for the group’s journal, The United Amateur. His horror tale “The Eye Above the Mantel” appeared there in 1921, and one of the leading American writers and editors in the genre, H. P. Lovecraft, happened to read it. Lovecraft wrote to Long and encouraged him to write for the burgeoning pulp fiction market.
A burst appendix hospitalized Long later that year, keeping him out of classes and confirming his decision to quit college and begin writing professionally. In 1923 he sold his first story, “The Desert Lich,” to Weird Tales, the premier title in horror fiction. While continuing to sell stories to Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction, Long also dabbled in verse, and the first book he published was a poetry collection, A Man from Genoa, and Other Poems (1926).
In 1924, Lovecraft moved to New York, and Long became part of Lovecraft’s circle of horror and fantasy writers, including Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, and Henry Kuttner. Long became the first writer in the group besides Lovecraft to use characters and events from Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” in his first hardcover book The Hounds of Tindalos (1946). The “hounds” are actually creatures from another non-Euclidean dimension that enter our time and space through angles. They are Long’s most famous creation, celebrated in rock music and video games.
Though most of his early books were collections of his more than 150 short stories, Long serialized the novel-length “The Horror from the Hills” in Weird Tales in 1931, publishing it in book form thirty years later. Long published twenty-four additional novels between 1957 and 1981. When he married Lydia Arco in 1960, he used her name as a pseudonym under which to publish gothic romances. Though pulp fiction did not pay well, editing paid slightly more, so Long became an editor at Satellite Science Fiction and Short Story magazine in the 1950’s. He also wrote comic book scripts for Superman and Captain Marvel, as well as some horror titles that mirrored pulp magazines like Weird Tales.
In 1977, Long was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award, and the following year the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 1987, his peers in the Horror Writers of America gave him the Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement. Writing well into the 1980’s, including his 1985 Autobiographical Memoir, Long continued collecting his earlier stories in anthologies for a new generation of readers. He died on January 3, 1994, in his native New York, which he never left.