Frank Belknap Long and H.P. Lovecraft
Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), pulp magazine author and protege of H.P. Lovecraft, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded March 1, 1980 in Long’s apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Frank Belknap Long got his start as a young adult writing horror short stories for Weird Tales. Noted horror writer H.P. Lovecraft took him under his wing and became a close friend. Long later went on to write for several other pulp magazines, including those in the field of science fiction, mystery and thriller. He later became a pulp magazine editor.
Richard Wolinsky:
On March 1, 1980, a bitterly cold day in New York, I found myself in the then ungentrified Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, dealing with a vicious cold myself, ringing the bell to Long’s flat in a dilapidated apartment house.
Probabilities had been on the air on KPFA for three years at the time, and my co-hosts Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson were already deep into their search for the pulp writers and editors of the first half of the twentieth century. I was armed with notes from both co-hosts, and had read Long’s recent book The Early Long, which contained autobiographical introductions to his very first horror stories, published in the legendary pulp magazine, Weird Tales.
I could see a long hallway filled with junk, and in the distance, the living room, entered through the door the width of the hallway. There was one door to the side, a bathroom, which I used before we started. The tub was filled with dog poop from his German Shepherd. Mr. Long, much shorter than I am, and looking every day of his almost 79 years, looked clean and dapper, in a suit with vest that could have come from when he was my age. He shouted a couple of times to his unseen wife Lyda down the hall, before we sat down on a steamer trunk to start the interview.
Dick and Lawrence always focused on the people in the pulps as well as what it was like to be a writer at the time, so there’s very little here about the content of Long’s stories, other than their titles. Most of the names, other than H.P. Lovecraft, are forgotten now, writers like Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffman Price, Seabury Quinn and August Derleth. Mention is made of John W. Campbell, who was the editor of Astounding Stories, later Analog, from October 1937 until his death at the age of 61 in July 1971, and who, almost singlehandedly, transformed science fiction.
The tape was barely usable because of the thinness of his voice and his slurring, and the heavy echo from the walls and the old hardwood floor, and was digitized and edited from July into October, 2026.
While the AI augmentation makes the entire interview available in 2026, it still garbles some of Long’s answers, and at the end of the interview, we hear Lyda Long sounding as if she’s in the hallway with us. She wasn’t. She was a strange disembodied voice coming from the depths of the apartment, Positively Lovecraftian.
As the interview ended, Lyda ordered me to come down the hallway. She had something to show me. I don’t remember the living room itself, other than a strange elderly woman was sitting on the floor, surrounded by torn paper. She wore a bright orange Lucy Ricardo wig, and her skin was gray, almost inhuman. She showed me some papers then handed me a note for Dick Lupoff’s wife, Pat. They’d met at a convention in the not-so-distant past. After I took my leave, I headed uptown to Times Square to meet my dad and then see Angela Lansbury in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a fitting end to a cold and creepy day. Later, when I returned to California, I gave Lyda’s note to Pat, who put on a glove, picked it up and deposited it immediately in a trash can.
You’ve been listening to an interview with the late horror writer, Frank Belknap Long, who died in 1994 at the age of 92. It was recorded at his apartment in Chelsea, New York City on March 1, 1980.
If you go to Amazon, you’ll find a number of Frank Belknap Long’s short stories available to read via Kindle for free. The Early Long is not currently available, but Frank Belknap Long’s biography of his mentor, H.P. Lovecraft, Dreamer on the Night Side, was published in 2019 by Wildside Press.
Excerpts from this interview can be found in the book Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! Interviews with Science Fiction Legends, edited by Richard Wolinsky and published by Tachyon Press in 2025.
The post Probabilities Archive: Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), Pulp Magazine Horror Writer appeared first on KPFA.
