Farnsworth Wright

Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday.
Wright, a veteran of World War I, was working as a music critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner when he began his association with Weird Tales, founded in 1923. At first serving as chief manuscript reader, he replaced founding editor Edwin Baird in 1924 when the latter was fired by publisher J. C. Henneberger.
Wright's editorship of the magazine, which lasted until 1940, is considered the magazine's golden age, when it was regularly publishing such authors as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Yet Wright had a strained relationship with all three writers, rejecting major works by them such as Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Howard's "The Frost Giant's Daughter" and Smith's "The Seven Geases" (which Wright dismissed as just "one geas after another")The Book of Hyperborea, Will Murray, editor (Necronomicon Press, 1996), quoted in Wikipedia, "Farnsworth Wright"..
Wright (nicknamed "Plato" by his writers) was also noteworthy for starting the commercial careers of three important fantasy artists: Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, and Hannes Bok. Each of the three made their first sale to, and had their work first appear in, Weird Tales.
Robert Bloch, who wrote frequently for Wright, recalled him as a tall thin man with a small, thin voice. The latter, together with a persistent palsy, was probably due to the effects of Parkinson's disease, an affliction which had plagued him since wartime military service. An authority on Shakespeare and a former music critic, this soft-spoken, balding, prematurely aged man seemed miscast as editor of a publication featuring bimbos uncovered on its covers and horrors concealed within its pages.Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorised Autobiography , by Robert Bloch (Tor Books, 1993); quoted in Wikipedia, "Farnsworth Wright".Wright developed Parkinson's disease in 1921; by 1930, he was unable to sign his own letters. His failing health forced him to step down as editor in 1940, and he died later that year.
==Wright and Lovecraft==
While Wright's predecessor, Edwin Baird, had published everything Lovecraft had submitted, Wright was more particular; his rejection of "The Shunned House" was the first the writer had received from the magazine. "Wright tended to accept HPL's more conventional tales and to reject his more aesthetically challenging ones," An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Farnsworth Wright", S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. After the necrophilia of "The Loved Dead" almost got the magazine banned in Indiana, Wright was reluctant to publish work from Lovecraft that he considered too gruesome, turning down "In the Vault" and "Cool Air" for that reason. Sometimes Wright would initially reject stories and then reconsider, as he did with "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Weird Tales", S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.
Lovecraft was particularly rankled by Wright's turning down At the Mountains of Madness, a story he was particularly proud of. For the next five years, Lovecraft submitted only one story to Wright--"In the Vault", which was rejected; when August Derleth showed The Shadow over Innsmouth and "Dreams in the Witch-House" to Wright without Lovecraft's permission, only the latter was accepted. Lovecraft did offer two of his final stories to Weird Tales in 1936, "The Thing on the Doorstep" and "The Haunter of the Dark", and both were taken.
Lovecraft came to feel that Wright had had a negative impact on his writing. "That ass Wright got me into the habit of obvious writing with his never-ending complaints against the indefiniteness of my early stuff," he complained.
In "In the Walls of Eryx", by Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling, the Venusian farnoth-flies are named after Wright.
==References==
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Category:Editors
Category:Deceased (Real World)