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About Long –
You may not recognize Long’s name but don’t let the patina of time dim you to his contributions. Among other things, he wrote comics during the heyday of the 1940s and wrote Superman, Captain Marvel, and Green Lantern. He passed away in 94 and had written hundreds of short stories during the pulp era, and then dozens of novels after it died. He moved as the currents took him, and he was a chameleon. He wrote sci fi when it was popular, spy stories in the 60s, comics in the 40s, and so forth. To this day, he is still best remembered for his Mythos stories, and his greatest contribution to the Mythos is this story. You must read it first when you move outside of the big names, and you’ll see why.
Long mentions that Lovecraft and him exchanged more than 1000 letters some of which are more than 80 handwritten pages long. He was one of Lovecraft’s greatest correspondences, but not his only one. As a reminder, Lovecraft developed relationships with tons of new writers during his era. He ghost-wrote, edited, revised them, wrote to them, and tutored them. This was often voluntary on his part, but some contend that he got more money from his revisions of other authors than he did from his own work.
Frank Belknap Long was a distinguished enough author in the mid-30s to be invited onto The Challenge from Beyond project. This was a project by a pulp magazine to write a story in five chapters, with an author writing each chapter. The five authors writing the story were C.L. Moore, A Merritt, HP Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Frank Belknap Long. A Merritt is a huge name as well. (We’ll read a very popular story of his in Gen 0).
Anyway, Long is not some random name I am pulling out a hat ,but one with a very strong connection to the Mythos.
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