Dipping at random into my newly arrived book of Letters to Donald and Howard Wandrei has yielded up a new addition to my recent Harlem post at Tentaclii. In a 1927 letter Lovecraft talks of the sights the lad must see in New York, and one of these was Harlem…

sinister and fascinating — not a white face for blocks. Lenox Ave. subway to 125th St. — walk north.

This most likely indicates a route Lovecraft was familiar with. Possibly the one he took to visit Morton, who lived in a Harlem brownstone, or one that Morton took to give Lovecraft a taste of Harlem. We know from Lovecraft’s day-by-day 1925 Diary that he made a trip into Harlem at least once.

Update: There was at least one meeting of the Kalem Club in Harlem, at Morton’s place in the heat of August 1924, and this is attested by a Lovecraft letter in Letters to Family and a mention in Kirk’s Diary.

Also found was a new addition to the ‘Lovecraft as character’ list, albeit not extant. In a 1931 letter Lovecraft revealed that Frank Belknap Long was busy writing a novel with Lovecraft and his circle as lightly-veiled characters. This work has evidently not survived. Although Long’s “The Black Druid” (1930) has, in which Lovecraft is the lightly-veiled “Stephen Benefield”. Possibly the novel was an expansion of “The Black Druid”?