A. Merritt

• 1. Introduction

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  A. Merritt earned $100,000 a year by the end of his life, but the work he is remembered for was never his day job. Abraham Grace Merritt, born on the 20th of January 1884 in Beverly, New Jersey, spent his professional life as a magazine editor. His fiction, eight complete novels and a string of short stories, was something he pursued on the side. Yet those novels made him a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft, inspired Gary Gygax when he was designing Dungeons and Dragons, and earned a place on lists of the greatest supernatural horror and fantasy novels ever written. How does a Sunday magazine editor, best known among his colleagues for wearing kilts and serenading the newsroom, become one of the foundational voices of American fantastic fiction? The answer has everything to do with lush prose, a locked closet full of musical instruments, and more than 5,000 volumes of occult literature.

• 2. From Law to the Newsroom

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  Beverly, New Jersey, in 1884 was the starting point for a life that would take Merritt from law school to the newsroom to the heights of American magazine publishing. He moved with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1894. Originally trained in law, he pivoted to journalism, beginning as a correspondent before rising to an editorial role. Something happened to him during his early years as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, an experience his biographer Peter Haining described as harrowing, though Merritt himself refused to ever speak of it. Haining argued that this unnamed incident marked a turning point in his life. Whatever it was, it did not slow his career. By 1912 he had joined The American Weekly as assistant editor under Morrill Goddard, and he would hold that post until 1937, when he became the publication's editor outright. He stayed in that chair until his death. One of his more consequential editorial decisions was hiring Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, two artists who were then completely unknown, and championing both their careers. He also used his editorial platform to promote the work of Sister Elizabeth Kenny on polio treatment, a cause well outside the usual scope of a Sunday supplement.

• 3. The Eccentric at $25,000 a Year

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  By 1919, Merritt was earning $25,000 a year, making him one of the best-paid journalists of his era. His financial comfort allowed him to invest in real estate in Jamaica and Ecuador, to travel widely, and to cultivate a set of hobbies that raised eyebrows. He grew orchids and plants associated with witchcraft and magic, including monkshood, wolfbane, blue datura, peyote, and cannabis. At the office, he was known as a hypochondriac who discussed his medical symptoms at great length. He also had a habit of sampling any food, tobacco, or medicine he found sitting on a coworker's desk. Occasionally he would change into a kilt and give serenades to his colleagues using instruments he kept in a locked closet. Despite these eccentricities, he was widely liked. His coworkers appreciated his fairness, and he had a known inability to fire anyone. At home in the Hollis Park Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York City, he accumulated collections of weapons, carvings, and primitive masks gathered during his travels. His library of occult literature reportedly exceeded 5,000 volumes. He married twice: first in the 1910s to Eleanore Ratcliffe, with whom he raised an adopted daughter, and again in the 1930s to Eleanor H. Johnson. He died suddenly of a heart attack on the 21st of August 1943, at his winter home in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.

• 4. The Pulp Prose Style

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  Merritt's first fantasy story, "Through the Dragon Glass", appeared in the November 14 issue of Frank Munsey's All-Story Weekly in 1917. What followed was a run of serial novels and short fiction spread across the Munsey magazines, including All-Story, Argosy All-Story, and Argosy. The titles kept coming through the 1920s and 1930s: The Ship of Ishtar in 1924, Seven Footprints to Satan in 1927, Burn Witch Burn! in 1932, and Creep, Shadow! in 1934. His stories drew on the conventions of pulp magazines: lost civilizations, hideous monsters, gallant Irishmen and Scandinavians as heroes, treacherous Germans and Russians as villains, and heroines who were typically virginal, mysterious, and scantily clad. His chief influences included H. Rider Haggard, Robert W. Chambers, Helena Blavatsky, and Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who wrote under the name Francis Stevens. One account holds that Merritt emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes directly. What lifted him above the standard pulp template was a lush, florid prose style and an appetite for adjective-laden description so dense it could tip into the exhausting. That same love of micro-description paired naturally with the pointillistic illustration style of Hannes Bok, making their collaborations a visual and literary match.

• 5. Influence and Legacy

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  Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, listed Merritt in "Appendix N" of the Dungeon Masters Guide and named him as one of his favorite fantasy authors. Merritt was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, as part of its fourth class. Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn selected The Ship of Ishtar and Dwellers in the Mirage for their book Fantasy: the 100 Best Books, calling The Ship of Ishtar Merritt at the peak of his powers and describing his body of work as full of memorable images. Karl Edward Wagner placed Burn Witch Burn on his list of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels, published in the May 1983 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine, and Robert Bloch made the same novel one of his favorite horror books. E. E. Smith included a direct reference to Dwellers in the Mirage in the Lensman series, where the protagonist Kimball Kinnison quotes the line "Luka, turn your wheel so I need not slay this woman!" Merritt also contributed to "The Challenge from Beyond", a round robin story written alongside Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Frank Belknap Long. After his death, Hannes Bok completed two unfinished works using Merritt's unpublished material: The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda in 1946 and The Black Wheel in 1948, both published in hardcover by the small press The New Collectors Group.

• 6. Adaptation and Aftermath

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  Sam Moskowitz, after Merritt's death, discovered a collection of poems in his papers. Some of those poems may have been written by other authors, though they were credited to Merritt when they were eventually published. Merritt's fiction reached film only rarely. Seven Footprints to Satan was adapted and directed by Benjamin Christensen in 1929. The novel Burn Witch Burn! was adapted twice: once as The Devil-Doll, directed by Tod Browning in 1936, and again as Muñecos infernales, directed by Benito Alazraki in 1961, though that second adaptation did not credit Merritt. The relative scarcity of adaptations makes the depth of his influence on other writers all the more striking. A man who considered fiction a sideline to a journalism career left behind eight complete novels, a string of short stories, essays, poems, and collaborative works that writers and game designers were still reading and citing decades after his death at Indian Rocks Beach.