News of a new book of Lovecraft letters, from S.T. Joshi…
David E. Schultz and I are working hard on getting Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch ready for publication with Hippocampus Press. It will also include letters to Natalie H. Wooley, Robert Nelson, William Frederick Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald A. Wollheim, Wilson Shepherd, and Willis Conover. A fat book! This could be published as early as February 2015. After that — the joint correspondence of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith!”
* Robert Nelson (1912-1935) isn’t in The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia. But there is information here. The blurb for a 2012 book collection of his work, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters, gives a biographical outline…
Robert Nelson (1912-1935) was a contributor of verse to Weird Tales magazine in the mid-1930s, and of verse and prose to fan magazines like The Fantasy Fan. He was also a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. … Also included [in the book] are five [1930s] letters by H.P. Lovecraft”
* Natalie Hartley Wooley corresponded 1933–37. She was a poet of the amateur journalism movement, with poetry in The Tryout and probably other amateur journals. She also had poetry and at least one “straight ghost story” in The Fantasy Fan, plus a lead essay on “The Adventure Story” in The Californian (Fall 1935) which had an early critical appraisal of a Conan story. Lovecraft’s letters to her appear to have had much to say on race relations, pungent extracts from which have already been published in Selected Letters.
* Wilson Shepherd was a friend of Wollheim, publishing the forerunner (Fanciful Tales?) to The Phantagraph. He corresponded 1936-37, and Lovecraft revised a couple of his poems. He published “A History of the Necronomicon” in pamphlet form in 1937.
Natalie Hartley Wooley was my grandmother.