Some days ago I posted a brief item about Norman Mailer writing a story for the horror pulp magazine, Weird Tales. The discussion over Mailer on the PulpMags e-mail list continued and I got the permission to post some stuff from there to here. (This discussion is probably pretty meaningless to someone who has no knowledge about the old pulp mags.)
Someone said that if Mailer's story was rejected, it must've been pretty bad, since Weird Tales published so much terrible stories. Pulp and adventure fan Morgan Holmes wrote (and I asked his permission to post his response here):
I wouldn't assume that Mailer's story submitted to WEIRD TALES was terrible. [The Weird Tales editor] Farnsworth Wright was a mediocre editor who was lucky. Take the Lovecraft circle out of the equation and what do you have left? Wright ran lots bad stories while rejecting Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" which Lovecraft worked on to make into a two-part serial. Wright rejected it saying "not convincing."
Lovecraft didn't submit anything directly to Wright for about six years. We probably lost at least six stories from Lovecraft because of Wright. Wright also rejected Clark Ashton Smith's "Abominations of Yondo" in 1925. Smith's fiction writing career could have started five years earlier.
Wright rejected two stories by Henry Kuttner about King Alfred saying they were "delectibly weird" but gave no reason for rejection. Kuttner pounded out the first Elak story, "Thunder in the Dawn" as a satire in response. He wrote a letter to Clark Ashton Smith wondering if any of the readers would catch the satirical elements in it.
Cap Shaw turned BLACK MASK around, F. Orlin Tremaine took ASTOUNDING STORIES to the next level. WEIRD TALES could have been more successful if there had been an editor willing to take risks and not second guess some of the readers. Mailer might have sent something in that might have needed some polish. Wright probably just rejected it instead of making suggested improvements. I have noted some interesting writers in the late 1920s that had one or two stories and then disappeared. A good editor would have been working with those neophytes. If you take Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore out of the 1930s "Golden Age," you don't have much left.
There was also some discussion over when Mailer wrote the said story. The original contributor said Mailer had said to him that he wrote it in "his middle teens, or maybe younger". So it could've been before 1940 - Mailer was born in 1923. (And then, said someone, he would've sent the story to another editor that Farnsworth Wright, namely Dorothy McIlwraith.)
Someone said that if Mailer's story was rejected, it must've been pretty bad, since Weird Tales published so much terrible stories. Pulp and adventure fan Morgan Holmes wrote (and I asked his permission to post his response here):
I wouldn't assume that Mailer's story submitted to WEIRD TALES was terrible. [The Weird Tales editor] Farnsworth Wright was a mediocre editor who was lucky. Take the Lovecraft circle out of the equation and what do you have left? Wright ran lots bad stories while rejecting Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" which Lovecraft worked on to make into a two-part serial. Wright rejected it saying "not convincing."
Lovecraft didn't submit anything directly to Wright for about six years. We probably lost at least six stories from Lovecraft because of Wright. Wright also rejected Clark Ashton Smith's "Abominations of Yondo" in 1925. Smith's fiction writing career could have started five years earlier.
Wright rejected two stories by Henry Kuttner about King Alfred saying they were "delectibly weird" but gave no reason for rejection. Kuttner pounded out the first Elak story, "Thunder in the Dawn" as a satire in response. He wrote a letter to Clark Ashton Smith wondering if any of the readers would catch the satirical elements in it.
Cap Shaw turned BLACK MASK around, F. Orlin Tremaine took ASTOUNDING STORIES to the next level. WEIRD TALES could have been more successful if there had been an editor willing to take risks and not second guess some of the readers. Mailer might have sent something in that might have needed some polish. Wright probably just rejected it instead of making suggested improvements. I have noted some interesting writers in the late 1920s that had one or two stories and then disappeared. A good editor would have been working with those neophytes. If you take Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore out of the 1930s "Golden Age," you don't have much left.
There was also some discussion over when Mailer wrote the said story. The original contributor said Mailer had said to him that he wrote it in "his middle teens, or maybe younger". So it could've been before 1940 - Mailer was born in 1923. (And then, said someone, he would've sent the story to another editor that Farnsworth Wright, namely Dorothy McIlwraith.)
The image above is from 1942, when Mailer could've been writing his story for the magazine. I don't know the cover illustrator, maybe Boris Dolgov? (I'm not really good in pulp illustrators, I'm sorry to say. Maybe someone can tell.)
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