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E. Hoffman Price
| Full Name: |
Edgar
Hoffmann Trooper
Price |
| Born: |
July 3, 1898
Fowler, California, USA |
| Died: |
June 18, 1988
Redwood City, California, USA |
| Occupation: |
Writer |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Links: |
|
Biography
Edgar Hoffmann Price was an American writer of popular fiction (he was a self-titled 'fictioneer') for the pulp magazine marketplace. Originally intending to be a career soldier, Price graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point; he served in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, and with the American military in Mexico and the Philippines. He was a champion fencer and boxer, an amateur Orientalist, and a student of the Arabic language; science-fiction author Jack Williamson, in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child, called E. Hoffmann Price a "real live soldier of fortune".
In his literary career, Hoffmann Price produced fiction for a wide range of publications, from Argosy to Terror Tales, from Speed Detective to Spicy Mystery Stories. Yet he was most readily identified as a Weird Tales writer, one of the group who wrote regularly for editor Farnsworth Wright, a group that included H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline, and a collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", a sequel to account for protagonist Randolph Carter's doings after his disappearance in "The Silver Key".
Some of Price's stories aroused controversy; "The Stranger from Kurdistan" (1925), a story which featured a dialogue between Christ and Satan, was criticised by some readers as blasphemous but proved popular with Weird Tales readers. (Lovecraft professed to find it especially powerful). "The Infidel's Daughter" (1927), a satire on the Ku Klux Klan, also angered some Southern readers, but Wright defended the story.
Price worked in a range of popular genres -- including science fiction, horror, crime, and fantasy -- but he was best known for adventure stories with Oriental settings and atmosphere. Price also contributed to Farnsworth Wright's short-lived magazine The Magic Carpet, along with Kline, Howard, Smith, and other Weird Tales regulars.
Like many other pulp-fiction writers, Price could not support himself and his family on his income from literature. Living in New Orleans in the 1930s, he worked for a time for the Union Carbide Corporation. Nonetheless he managed to travel widely and maintain friendships with many other pulp writers, including his contemporaries from Weird Tales.
Late in life, Price experienced a major literary resurgence. In the 1970s and '80s he issued a series of SF, fantasy, and adventure novels, published in paperback. Price was one of the first speakers at San Francisco's Maltese Falcon Society in 1981. He received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984. A collection of his literary memoirs, Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear, Fictioneers & Others, was published posthumously in 2001.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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