E. Hoffmann Price

Life and the beginning of a working career

Edgar Hoffmann Price was born in Fowler, California, on 3 July 1898 and died in Redwood City on 18 June 1988. A First World War veteran and 1923 West Point graduate, he brought experience outside literary circles to the magazines. His first published story was Triangle with Variations in Droll Stories in June 1924.

The beginnings matter because Price already had a professional identity before he met Lovecraft. He was neither an invented name on a collaborative byline nor a writer whose entire career can be reconstructed from Randolph Carter's adventures.

Sources: E. Hoffmann Price — biographical reference

The 1934 interview: markets, money and revision

Fred Anger and Louis C. Smith interviewed Price for The Fantasy Fan in December 1934. Their account identifies The Rajah's Gift, in the January 1925 Weird Tales, as his first appearance in that magazine. It also records a payment of twenty-four dollars for his earlier sale to Droll Stories. The distinction between first sale and first Weird Tales appearance corrects an easy compression of his career.

According to the interview, he turned to full-time fiction in spring 1932 after losing his acetylene-plant management work. This makes the economic setting of his correspondence with Lovecraft unusually concrete. Acceptance by an editor was a means of supporting himself, not simply an abstract judgment on literary prestige.

The interview also gives an example of revision. Farnsworth Wright accepted The Lord of the Fourth Axis only after three rewrites; an unusual Turkestan prayer rug in Wright's home supplied an element of the tale. Here, editorial contact involved material observation and repeated adjustment. A supernatural story could grow from a physical object and be reshaped through negotiation with a magazine.

Sources: Fred Anger and Louis C. Smith — An Interview with E. Hoffmann Price, The Fantasy Fan, December 1934

Travel and the construction of fictional settings

The same contemporary profile connects the Pierre d'Artois stories with Price's residence in Bayonne and his visits to underground chambers there. It associates Tarbis of the Lake with legends he encountered at Lourdes and The Prophet's Grand-children with material gathered in the Philippines. Years in New Orleans helped supply another recognizable environment.

These are claims about how a writer gathered material. They do not make his fictional representations authoritative accounts of the communities he portrayed. His adventures belong to pulp traditions that frequently packaged unfamiliar religions and places as spectacle. The useful historical distinction is between an identifiable journey or object, an author's account of its influence, and the invented narrative made from it.

The profile's descriptions of mechanical repair and cooking also place Price in a social world larger than the printed stories. Its admiring, informal tone is part of its evidence: it presents a personable member of a literary network to readers of a small fan magazine, rather than offering a detached assessment of his entire life.

Sources: Fred Anger and Louis C. Smith — An Interview with E. Hoffmann Price, The Fantasy Fan, December 1934

Meeting Lovecraft and proposing a sequel

Price met Lovecraft in New Orleans on 12 June 1932 after Robert E. Howard alerted him to the visit. Their subsequent correspondence included disagreement over pulp formulas and the necessity of earning a living from them.

In August 1932 Price drafted The Lord of Illusion as a proposed sequel to The Silver Key. Lovecraft substantially rewrote it, completing his version in April 1933. The resulting Through the Gates of the Silver Key appeared in Weird Tales in July 1934 under both names. Price's draft did not reach print until 1982.

This history supports a specific account of collaboration: Price supplied the initiating sequel and conceptions that Lovecraft reworked. It does not support attributing every sentence equally to both men, or treating the published story as unrelated to Price merely because Lovecraft transformed its prose.

Sources: Joshi and Schultz — E. Hoffmann Price, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

What the collaboration adds to Randolph Carter

Through the Gates of the Silver Key turns Carter's disappearance into an argument about identity, property and the limits of an individual human self. An account of immense metaphysical travel is delivered within a meeting concerning an absent man's estate. The contrast gives the cosmic material an immediate practical question: who has the right to speak and act as Carter?

Beyond the gates, Carter encounters the idea that his familiar personality is one manifestation among others extending across time and space. The movement into the body of Zkauba on Yaddith makes that proposition dangerous rather than merely consoling. Knowledge of a larger identity does not automatically provide the means to return to the desired body and world.

The figure presenting the account, Swami Chandraputra, connects the cosmic journey back to disguise and testimony. His difficulty is not exhausted by whether listeners believe an extraordinary report. Physical identity, competing consciousness and legal recognition no longer coincide. Read beside The Silver Key, the sequel changes the recovery of childhood and dream into a problem of navigating forms of existence.

These are features of the published joint text. Separating the collaborators' precise contributions requires comparison with Price's draft and the surviving correspondence; the story alone cannot establish who first conceived every image or development.

Sources: Through the Gates of the Silver Key — original text

Later collections, novels and memoir

Strange Gateways appeared in 1967 and Far Lands, Other Days in 1975. A later phase of novel writing included The Devil Wives of Li Fong in 1979 and The Jade Enchantress in 1982, alongside science fiction. The World Fantasy lifetime achievement award followed in 1984.

Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear appeared posthumously from Arkham House in 2001. Its importance is different from that of a story collection: Price had known people who became central to the history of pulp fiction, and his recollections preserve his perspective on that network. Memoirs remain retrospective testimony, to be compared with contemporary letters when dates or exchanges are disputed.

E. Hoffmann Price must also be distinguished from Robert M. Price, the later editor and Mythos scholar. Their shared surname does not make their authorship, editorial work or historical roles interchangeable.

Sources: E. Hoffmann Price — biographical reference, Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear — edition record