Frank Belknap Long - Biography

Biography

Frank Belknap Long was born in New York City in 1901, and grew up in the Harlem area of Manhattan. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was May Doty. The family resided at 823 West End Avenue in Manhattan. A lifelong resident of New York City, he was educated in the New York City public school system. As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he dreamed of running "away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon." He developed his interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells as well as Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. Though writing was to be his life's work, he once commented that as "important as writing is, I could have been completely happy if I had a secure position in a field that has always had a tremendous emotion and an imaginative appeal for me—that of natural history."

In his late teens, he was active in the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in which he won a prize from The Boy's World (around 1919) and thus discovered amateur journalism. His first published tale was "Dr Whitlock's Price (United Amateur, March 1920). Long's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" (1921) in UAPA caught the eye of H. P. Lovecraft, sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937.

Long attended New York University from 1920 to 1921, studying journalism but later transferred to Columbia, leaving without a degree. In 1921, he suffered a severe attack of appendicitis, leading to a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He spent a month in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, where he came close to dying. Long's brush with death propelled him into a decision that he would leave college to pursue a freelance writing career.

In 1923, at the age of 22, he sold his first short story, "The Desert Lich", to Weird Tales magazine. Throughout the next four decades, Long was to be a frequent contributor to pulp magazines, including two of the most famous: Weird Tales (under editor Farnsworth Wright) and Astounding Science Fiction (under editor John W. Campbell). Long was an active freelance writer, also publishing many non-fiction articles. His first book, the scarce volume A Man from Genoa and Other Poems, was published in 1926 by W. Paul Cook. The poems in this collection won praise from a great variety of writers, among them Arthur Machen, Clifford Gessler, Robinson Jeffers, William Ellery Leonard, John Drinkwater, John Masefield and George Sterling

His second published book was also a volume of fantastic poetry - The Goblin Tower (1928), published jointly by H.P. Lovecraft and Robert H. Barlow. "The Horror from the Hills", a story serialised in 1931 in Weird Tales and one of Long's best-known works, incorporated almost verbatim a dream H.P. Lovecraft related to him (among other correspondents) in a letter. The short novel was published many years later in separate book form by Arkham House in 1963 - The Horror from the Hills.

In the late 1930s, Long turned his hand to science fiction, writing for Astounding Science Fiction. He also contributed horror stories to Unknown, later called Unknown Worlds. Long contributed an episode (along with C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft) to the round-robin story "The Challenge from Beyond" (1935). His later science fiction works include the story collection John Carstairs, Space Detective (1949), and the novels Space Station 1 (1957), Mars is My Destination (1962) and It Was the Day of the Robot (1963).

In pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories during the 1940s, Long sometimes wrote using the pseudonym 'Leslie Northern.' What Long characterized as a "minor disability" kept him out of World War II and writing full time during the early 1940s. Long reputedly ghost-wrote two, possibly three, of the Ellery Queen Junior novels (see Ellery Queen (house name) (mentioned in correspondence with August Derleth) but unfortunately did not identify the three titles.

He also wrote comic books in the 1940s, including horror stories for Adventures Into the Unknown (ACG), and scripts for Planet Comics, Superman, Congo Bill, DC's Golden Age Green Lantern, and the Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel. He also worked in the 1940s as a script-reader for Twentieth Century Fox Long also write crime and weird menace stories for Ten Gang Mystery and other magazines. During the 1940's Long lived in California.

In 1946, Arkham House published Long's first collection of supernatural fiction, The Hounds of Tindalos, which collected 21 of his best tales from the previous twenty years of magazine publication. It featured works which had appeared in such pulps as Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, Super-Science, Unknown, Thrilling Wonder Stories and others.

Ever versatile as a writer, Long changed with the times. In the 1950s he was uncredited associate editor on The Saint Mystery Magazine and Fantastic Universe. He was associate editor on Satellite Science Fiction, 1959; on Short Stories, 1959–60; and on Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine until 1966.

Long several times met fellow Weird Tales writer and poet, Joseph Payne Brennan, and later provided the Foreword for Brennan's The Chronicles of Lucius Leffing (1977).

After the decline of the pulps, Long moved into writing science fiction and gothic romance novels (and even a Man from UNCLE story The Electronic Frankenstein Affair, which appeared under the pen name Robert Hart Davis in the Man from UNCLE Magazine).

Long wrote nine modern Gothic novels, starting with So Dark a Heritage in 1966 (published under his own name), eight of which were published as by 'Lyda Belknap Long' (a combination of his wife (Lyda Arco Long)'s first name and his middle name and surname. All were entirely his own work and were workmanlike products intended to support him and his wife rather than to be of high literary quality. According to Elsa J. Radcliffe, Crucible of Evil (1974) is "a very clumsy tale both in plot and writing style. Much of the suspense seems contrived and the plot tediously simplistic."

Long also published collections of his short stories (such as The Hounds of Tindalos and Night Fear) and poetry (including In Mayan Splendor), a biography of H. P. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, and his own Autobiographical Memoir (Necronomicon Press, 1986). Illumination on his own life and work is also provided by his introduction to The Early Long (1975), a collection of his best early stories.

He married Lyda Arco,a Russian descended from a line of actors in the Yiddish theatre who ran a salon in Chelsea, NY, in 1960. They stayed together till Long's death in 1994, but had no children. Long described himself as an "agnostic." Referring to Lovecraft, Long wrote that he "always shared HPL's skepticism . . . concerning the entire range of alleged supernatural occurrences and what is commonly defined as 'the occult.'"

Long died on January 3, 1994 at the age of 92, survived by his wife, Lyda. Due to his poverty, he was interred in a potter's field for indigents. Friends and colleagues, on learning of this indignity, had his remains moved and reinterred at New York City's Woodlawn Cemetery, in a family plot near that of Lovecraft's grandparents. Despite a seven-decade career as a writer, he had died impoverished after many years living in the Chelsea District of Manhattan; Long's fans contributed over $3000 to have his name engraved upon the tombstone of his family plot. Lyda died shortly after Frank and her ashes were scattered on his grave.

Frank Belknap Long left behind a body of work that included twenty-nine novels, 150 short stories, eight collections of short stories, three poetry collections, and numerous freelance magazine articles and comic book scripts. Author Ray Bradbury summed up Long's career: "Frank Belknap Long has lived through a major part of science fiction history in the U.S., has known most of the writers personally, or has corresponded with them, and has, with his own writing, helped shape the field when most of us were still in our early teens."