Letters To James F. Morton by H. P. Lovecraft

James Ferdinand Morton, Jr. (1870–1941), was a pamphleteer, amateur journalist, and friend of HPL. Morton received a simultaneous B.A. and M.A. from Harvard in 1892. In 1896–97 he was president of the NAPA; in later years he would become president of the Thomas Paine Natural History Association and vice president of the Esperanto Association of North America. He wrote numerous pamphlets supporting free speech, free love, and the single tax and attacking religion and race prejudice.

 

Morton and Lovecraft met unexpectedly at an amateur gathering in 1920, becoming regular correspondents and visiting each other in their respective home towns of Providence, Rhode Island and Paterson, New Jersey. Although Morton's letters to Lovecraft are not extant, Lovecraft's side of the correspondence is among the most scintillating and wide ranging of any of his letters. The present volume will contain a representative sampling of writings by Morton, as well as memoirs of Morton by his peers, including Rheinhart Kleiner and Edward H. Cole.