Forging New Nexuses: Gassing Up Genre Writers of the 1920s and 2020s
Citation abbreviation notes: During the desperate economic precarity of the Great Depression, some of the most celebrated early writers of horror, weird, and sword & sorcery fiction found, via the highly resilient U.S. postal service, the voices of other aspirant wordsmiths. These exchanges of letters not only took place in relatively public venues, such as featured letters in magazines, but also private correspondences. H. P. Lovecraft found himself as a kind of epistolary super-nexus, writing thousands of pages to dozens of organizations and individuals, often laudably with a spirit of attentiveness, generosity, and earnestness. S. T. Joshi, a leading Lovecraft…
