Abraham Grace Merritt, known to the world as A. Merritt, was born on the 20th of January 1884 in Beverly, New Jersey, a quiet town just outside Philadelphia. While history remembers him as a master of fantastic fiction, his true identity was that of a high-powered newspaper editor who made a fortune writing about worlds that did not exist. He earned $100,000 a year by the time of his death, an astronomical sum for the 1940s, which funded a life of eccentricity and world travel. Merritt was not merely a writer; he was a curator of the bizarre, accumulating thousands of volumes of occult literature and collecting weapons and primitive masks from his journeys to Jamaica and Ecuador. His personal life was as strange as his stories, marked by a hypochondria that led him to test every food, tobacco, and medicine he found on his coworkers' desks. He was a man who wore kilts to work and played serenades on a massive collection of instruments kept in a locked closet, all while maintaining a reputation for fairness that made him unable to fire a single employee.
The Journalist Who Wrote Monsters
Before Merritt became the king of pulp fantasy, he was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he survived a harrowing experience that he never spoke about, a secret trauma that Peter Haining claims marked a turning point in his life. This experience propelled him from journalism into editing, where he served as assistant editor of The American Weekly from 1912 to 1937 under Morrill Goddard, eventually taking over as editor until his death. His fiction was originally a sideline to his lucrative career, yet it became his legacy. His first fantasy story, Through the Dragon Glass, appeared in 1917, followed by a deluge of serial novels and short stories that defined the genre. He wrote The People of the Pit in 1918, The Moon Pool in 1918, and The Metal Monster in 1920, which inaugurated Argosy All-Story Weekly. His prose was lush and florid, an exhaustive, adjective-laden style that complemented the pointillistic illustrations of Hannes Bok. He created a world of lost civilizations, hideous monsters, and gallant Irish or Scandinavian heroes fighting treacherous Germans and Russians, all wrapped in a narrative style that was as exhausting as it was beautiful.The Secret Life of A Merritt
Merritt's personal habits were as colorful as his fiction, blending hypochondria with a childlike curiosity that baffled his colleagues. He was known to dress in a kilt and play music for his coworkers using a huge collection of instruments stored in a locked closet at his office. His eccentricity extended to his hobbies, which included cultivating orchids and plants linked to witchcraft and magic, such as monkshood, wolfbane, blue datura, peyote, and cannabis. He lived in the Hollis Park Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York City, where he accumulated collections of weapons, carvings, and primitive masks from his travels. His library of occult literature reportedly exceeded 5,000 volumes, a testament to his obsession with the supernatural. Despite his strange behavior, he was well liked for his fairness and his inability to fire any employees, a trait that made him a beloved figure in the publishing world. He married twice, first to Eleanore Ratcliffe in the 1910s, with whom he raised an adopted daughter, and later to Eleanor H. Johnson in the 1930s. His life ended suddenly on the 21st of August 1943, when he suffered a heart attack at his winter home in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.