The Night of the Wolf by Frank Belknap Long

In pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories during the 1940's, Long sometimes wrote using the pseudonym 'Leslie Northern.' What Long characterized as a 'minor disability' kept him out of World War II and writing full time during the early 1940s. His first book, A Man from Genoa and Other Poems, was published in 1926. Long was an active freelance writer, also publishing many non-fiction articles. Throughout the next four decades, Long was to be a frequent contributor to pulp magazines, including two of the most famous: Weird Tales (under editor Farnsworth Wright) and Astounding Science Fiction (under editor John W. In 1923, at the age of 22, he sold his first short story, 'The Desert Lich', to Weird Tales magazine. Long's brush with death propelled him into a decision that he would leave college to pursue a freelance writing career. He spent a month in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, where he came close to dying. In 1921, he suffered a severe attack of appendicitis, leading to a ruptured appendix and peritonitis.

Long attended New York University from 1920 to 1921, studying journalism but later transferred to Columbia, leaving without a degree. Lovecraft, sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937. Long's story 'The Eye Above the Mantel' (1921) in UAPA caught the eye of H. His first published tale was 'Dr Whitlock's Price ( United Amateur, March 1920).

In his late teens, he was active in the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in which he won a prize from The Boy's World (around 1919) and thus discovered amateur journalism. Though writing was to be his life's work, he once commented that as 'important as writing is, I could have been completely happy if I had a secure position in a field that has always had a tremendous emotion and an imaginative appeal for me-that of natural history.'

As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he dreamed of running 'away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon.' He developed his interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G. A lifelong resident of New York City, he was educated in the New York City public school system. The family resided at 823 West End Avenue in Manhattan. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was May Doty. Frank Belknap Long was born in New York City in 1901, and grew up in the Harlem area of Manhattan.

The Night of the Wolf by Frank Belknap Long