Thanks to Randy Everts for telling me that an early Lovecraft revision is now scanned and online, “The Supremacy of Life” (1917)…

In one of the letters to [David V.] Bush dated 20th January 1918 HPL mentions the book he edited (re-wrote) for the Rev. W.S. Harrison of Starkville, Miss., a “long Miltonic epic in blank verse”

ex2

ex1

I wonder if the revision / ghost writing for this work may have prompted Lovecraft to muse upon the possibility of his lost “Life and Death” story (c. 1920). We know of one such instance: apparently working on a Bush revision had, in part, been a prompt for the dream that led to “Nyarlathotep”.