Early Life and education Long was born in
Manhattan, New York City on April 27, 1901. He grew up in the
Harlem area of Manhattan, residing at 823
West End Avenue. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was May Doty. Long's father was a keen fisher and hunter, and Long accompanied the family on annual summer vacations from the age of six months to 17. Trips were usually in the
Thousand Islands region on the Canadian shore, about seven miles from the village of
Gananoque. When he was three years old, on one of these vacations, Long fell into the river at the end of a long pier and contracted
pneumonia. A lifelong resident of New York City, Long was educated in the
New York City public school system. In his autobiographical introduction to his collection
The Early Long he recalls: "After graduating from PS24, just north of Mt Morris Park in Harlem, I attended
De Witt Clinton High School for four years and managed to graduate despite a spectacular lack of competence in algebra and geometry". 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, Long was active in the United
Amateur Press Association (UAPA) The poems in this collection are said to have won praise from a great variety of writers, among them
Arthur Machen,
Robinson Jeffers,
William Ellery Leonard,
John Drinkwater,
John Masefield and
George Sterling.
Samuel Loveman declared that Long's poem "The Marriage of Sir John de Mandeville" was worthy of
Christopher Marlowe. Long's closest friends (apart from H. P. Lovecraft) in this period included Samuel Loveman,
H. Warner Munn, and
James F. Morton. He had several encounters with
Hart Crane, who lived one flight above Loveman in Brooklyn Heights.
1930s "The Horror from the Hills", a story serialised in 1931 in
Weird Tales, 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, as
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). Like
The Man from Genoa and Other Poems, his second book is a volume of fantastic verse:
The Goblin Tower (1935), published jointly by H. P. Lovecraft and
Robert H. Barlow under Barlow's The Dragonfly Press imprint. (A variant edition of this volume was published in 1945 by New Collectors Group – see Bibliography.) Published in an edition of only 100 copies, this volume is exceedingly scarce; two copies are held at the collections of the
John Hay Library.
1940s 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 reportedly ghost-wrote two, possibly three, of the
Ellery Queen Jr novels (mentioned in correspondence with
August Derleth) but did not identify the titles. It is believed that the two are
The Black Dog Mystery (1941) and
The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942). The third may have been
The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly, which was never published. (This volume is mentioned as Long's on the rear panel of
The Horror from the Hills and on the rear flap of
The Rim of the Unknown). He wrote
comic books in the 1940s, including horror stories for
Adventures Into the Unknown (ACG) commencing with its first issue in Fall 1948. Long contributed several original scripts to this comic's early issues, as well as an adaptation of Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto. He authored scripts for
Planet Comics,
Superman (in 1929),
Congo Bill,
DC's
Golden Age Green Lantern, and the
Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel. He worked in the 1940s as a script-reader for
Twentieth Century Fox 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 Stories,
Unknown,
Thrilling Wonder Stories,
Dynamic Science Fiction,
Startling Stories, and others. In "The Man from Time", a time-traveller from the future has an encounter with writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald. His later science fiction works include the story collection
John Carstairs, Space Detective (1949) about a 'botanical detective', and the novels
Space Station 1 (1957),
Mars is My Destination (1962) and
It Was the Day of the Robot (1963). '' story "The Body-Masters" was reprinted in 1950 as "The Love-Slave and the Scientists".
1950s In the 1950s he was involved with editing five different magazines. 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).
1960s After the decline of the pulps, Long moved into the prolific production of
science fiction and
gothic romance novels during the 1960s and 1970s. He even wrote a
Man from UNCLE story, "The Electronic Frankenstein Affair", which appeared under the pen name Robert Hart Davis in the
Man from UNCLE Magazine. In 1960, he married Lyda Arco, an artists' representative and aficionado of drama. She was a Russian descended from a line of actors in the Yiddish theatre who ran a salon in Chelsea, NY. They stayed together until 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.'" In 1963, Arkham House published Long's novel
The Horror from the Hills, a work partly incorporating Lovecraft's account of a dream Lovecraft had experienced. This work introduced Long's alien entity
Chaugnar Faugn into the
Cthulhu Mythos cycle.
1970s In 1972, Arkham House published
The Rim of the Unknown, their second hardcover collection of Long's work - a volume focusing primarily on his science fiction short stories. Long wrote nine modern Gothic novels, starting with
So Dark a Heritage in 1966 which was published under his own name. The other eight were published as "Lyda Belknap Long", a combination of his wife's first name and his middle and surname. Seven of the nine were released in the 1970s. Illumination on Long's own life and work is provided by his extensive introduction to
The Early Long (1975), a collection of his early stories. Further writing on his own life is found in his
Autobiographical Memoir (Necronomicon Press, 1986). Long's book-length memoir of H. P. Lovecraft,
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, was issued by Arkham House in 1975. It was written in haste as a result of Long's reading of
L. Sprague de Camp's
Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), which Long felt to be biased against Lovecraft. . In 1977, Arkham House issued Long's hardcover poetry collection
In Mayan Splendor, reprinting all the poems from
A Man from Genoa and Other Poems (1926) and
The Goblin Tower (1935), and adding a few others. He was recognized for his work in science-fiction with the
First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 1977. In 1978, he won the
World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement at the 4th World Fantasy Convention.
Later career: 1980s–1990s Long's literary output slowed down after 1977, with his gothic
The Lemoyne Heritage. He published several scattered stories in the 1980s including the story chapbook "Rehearsal Night" (Pub: Thomas L. Owen,1981) and one episode in the round-robin sequence
Ghor Kin-Slayer (Necronomicon Press, 1997). He and his wife lived in extreme poverty during the 1980s and 1990s in an apartment in
Chelsea, Manhattan - a period documented in Peter Cannon's memoir
Long Memories (1997) (expanded edition as
Long memories and Other Writings. In 1986, the long-running
Crypt of Cthulhu magazine devoted a special issue to Long and his work (Vol 5, No 8, Michaelmas 1986). The cover art for the issue by
Allen Koszowski depicted Long's
Cthulhu Mythos creation
Chaugnar Faughn. The issue reprinted five rare pulp stories by Long not collected in any of his other short story collections, together with three early long poems. Rounding out the issue are essays on Long's life and work by H.P. Lovecraft, Ben P. Indick, and Peter H. Cannon. In 1987, Long was awarded the
Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (from the Horror Writers Association). In 1990, Long was interviewed by
Leigh Blackmore at his home in New York. In August, Long was a Guest of Honor at the
H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference in
Providence, Rhode Island, in 1990, where he spoke on panels regarding his memories of his great friend and literary mentor. Long died of pneumonia on January 3, 1994, at the age of 92 at
Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan, after a seven-decade career as a writer and editor. He was briefly survived by his wife, Lyda. Lyda died shortly after Frank her ashes were scattered on his grave. In 2015, Wildside Press acquired the rights to Long's copyrights from Long's cousins. Since that time, all Wildside Press reprints of Long's work carry the acknowledgment "Reprinted with the kind permission and assistance of Lily Doty, Mansfield M. Doty, and the family of Frank Belknap Long." ==Legacy==