E. Hoffmann Price - Biography

Biography

Price was born at Fowler, California.

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 Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories in "the Unique Magazine" between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline, and his works with Lovecraft, noted above.

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. "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. Unsurprisingly, Price also contributed to Farnsworth Wright's short-lived but fondly-remembered The Magic Carpet (1930–34), 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 Kline and Edmond Hamilton. On a trip to Texas in the mid-1930s, Price was the only pulp writer to meet Robert E. Howard face to face. He was also the only man known to have met Howard and also H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (the great 'Triumvirate' of Weird Tales writers) in person. Over the course of his long life, Price left significant reminiscences of many significant figures in pulp fiction, Howard, Lovecraft, and Hamilton among them.

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; The Devil Wives of Li Fong (1979) is one noteworthy example. He also had published two anthologies of his pulp stories during hs lifetime--Strange Gateways and Far Lands, Other Days.

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. His writing friends and colleagues included Richard L. Tierney, H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Milne Farley, Robert Spencer Carr, and Farnsworth Wright among others.

Price was a Buddhist and a supporter of the Republican Party.

He died at Redwood City, California, in 1988.