About the Author: Frank Belknap Long, Jr. by Perry M. GraysonFrank Belknap Long, Jr. (APRIL 27, 1901 - JANUARY 3, 1994) is the prolific World Fantasy Award winning author of such books as The Hounds of Tindalos, The Horror from the Hills and The Rim of the Unknown. Incidentally, those titles are three of the most sought-after collector's items published by Arkham House, the specialty press founded in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to immortalize the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.Lovecraft discovered Long and took him under his wing after reading FBL's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" in The United Amateur in 1921. The two became best friends during the early 1920s while Lovecraft lived in New York. They exchanged hundreds of letters over the course of 15 years. The Lovecraft association tends to keep "Belknapius" (as he was called by HPL) in HPL's shadow, but Long's body of work speaks for itself.Fiction-wise, FBL primarily wrote in the realms of science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure and mystery. Over the course of his seven-decade career Long wrote over 300 stories, poems and articles, many of which have been widely reprinted in over 80 major publisher anthologies. Long's first professionally published story was "The Desert Lich," which appeared in the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His first book was A Man from Genoa and Other Poems (1926). The Long legacy is an important one in the annals of 20th century pop culture. He helped shape the fantasy, horror and science fiction fields while Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were still in their teens. Long was one of the few early science fiction writers to make the transition from the 1930s Astounding Stories to exacting editor John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown during SF's Golden Age. In the pages of Astounding and Unknown, Long appeared alongside Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Eric Frank Russell and many other highly respected SF luminaries. When the pulp magazines died in the mid-1950s, Long successfully made the transition to the paperback original. As a pioneering horror comic book script writer, Long paved the way for the immensely popular EC comics with his work in the ACG title Adventures into the Unknown (circa 1948). As an editor, Frank worked on magazines such as Fantastic Universe, Satellite Science Fiction, Short Stories and Mike Shayne Mystery during the 1950s and 1960s. Long's poetic bent carried over into his prose, and his verse kept the torch of romantic tradition alight during the age of modern free form poetry.FBL was honored with the Lifetime Achievement award from the World Fantasy Convention in 1978 and the Bram Stoker award for Lifetime Achievement from the Horror Writers of America in 1987. You might think that an author with such laurels would have enjoyed the success of modern horror acolytes like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Anne Rice, but Frank Long's existence was that of the struggling artist. Not a surprise when you consider Edgar Allan Poe's demise. An empty bank account, but a wealth of imagination. Long outlived most of his fellow pulp-era writers, and he made a final public appearance at the Lovecraft Centennial Conference in Providence, RI, in 1990. A New Yorker at heart, Long spent most of his life in the Big Apple-aside from a brief stint in California during World War II. He married Lyda Arco in 1961. Frank and Lyda had no children. Lyda was very protective of her husband's literary reputation, always reminding folks that Frank was much more than just Lovecraft's protégé. Long passed away on January 2, 1994. His spirit lives on in every word he wrote.
