I'm rather fond of Henry S. Whitehead, a pulpster that was contemporary with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard & co. at Weird Tales and Strange Tales, and who is today mostly known for his contributions to early voodoo stories and occult detective Canevin. For anyone interested in learning a bit more about him, sources on his life are somewhat scarce, and I've written a small article about him: [www.rehtwogunraconteur.com]

Also, I've got a (admittedly not great) scan of the very scarce 1942 publication of The Letters of Henry S. Whitehead; HSW wasn't always the most reliable concerning his own biography - he claimed he graduated Harvard, and even a PhD he never earned - but the letters make for a bit of interesting reading. [imgur.com]

I adore Whitehead and his fiction, and I love his solid friendship with HPL. I paid slight tribute to him by basing a character on him in my story, "Ye Unkempt Thing," although my characters any of Whitehead's dignity.

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

A few years back, I read The Red Lodge and The Ghost Hunt and was unimpressed at all.

It is reassuring to me that I am not the only one who confuses Whitehead with Wakefield.

O gawd--THAT'S why I can't find those stories in my editions of Whitehead!!! I was getting frantic.

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

Yup. You need to look in your editions of Wakefield.

A sort of spin-off from the Whitehead research: all I could find about G. P. Olsen (or Olson) of Sheldon, Iowa, who harangued Whitehead, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth and probably others with his rants about Einstein, vampires, and occultism in the early-mid 1930s. [www.rehtwogunraconteur.com]

Is it true that most of Whitehead´s stories are set in India? I do not like exotic locations too much so I am not certain if I should give him a try or not ...

No, most of his stories are set in the Virgin Islands; Whitehead visited the Caribbean for health reasons periodically, and served as an Episcopal priest down there for a while before retiring to Florida.

Ancient History Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> No, most of his stories are set in the Virgin
> Islands; Whitehead visited the Caribbean for
> health reasons periodically, and served as an
> Episcopal priest down there for a while before
> retiring to Florida.


Thanks. I will give him a try. :-)

Years ago, when the late Peter Ruber was editor of Arkham House, he had a section on the AH website (since taken down) called "Bat's Belfry," where he posted a number of Whitehead's letters in addition to those from Barlow's aborted "Canevinia" tribute. They do not appear to have been saved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but both Douglas A. Anderson and myself saved print outs. Doug has all of these, plus other HSW letters to Derleth, HPL, etc. (the late Roy Squires listed one to CAS years ago, don't know who has this), a number of stories that weren't collected by Arkham House (these were supposed to be in the tragically never-completed trilogy of Whitehead's collected stories that Ash-Tree Press was to publish), some essays, poems, and other miscellaneous pieces that he plans on publishing sometime. I have a copy of a writer's handbook in which he had two essays, plus an autographed copy of a juvenile novel, PINKIE AT CAMP CHEROKEE, that includes two oral ghost stories. One of these days I'm going to do some writing on HSW.

Huh. I'd really like to see that, Scott. I know Arthur Langley-Searles tracked down some of Whitehead's letters, and left them along with the rest of his papers to a university.

Yes, I was wondering what had happened concerning the other two volumes from Ash-Tree. That's a great pity, and I hope someone takes up the challenge to get all this material into print.

Battered Silicon Dispatch Box have een listing a trilogy of Whitehead collections for years, but as far as I know they are not available yet.

I have only read "Cassius". I don't know where to continue from here. I can't see myself going through Whitehead's entire corpus. Which are his best tales, do you think, especially among those collected in his famous Arkham House collections Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales and West India Lights?