Edkins, Ernest A[rthur]

   (1867–1946)

   Amateur writer and correspondent of HPL (1932–37). Edkins was one of the leading writers of the “halcyon days” (c. 1885–1895) of amateur journalism. In his account of this period, “Looking Backward” (1920), written long before he knew Edkins, HPL speaks of Edkins’s poem “The Suicide” as “a supremely artistic bit of weird genius…a bit of night-black poetical fancy so arresting in its sombre power that we cannot refrain from reproducing it here in full….” Edkins later left amateurdom and repudiated much of his literary work, becoming instead a businessman in Highland Park, Ill. (later Coral Gables, Fla.). HPL, getting in touch with him in 1932, eventually lured him back into amateur activity. Edkins produced several issues of the amateur journal Causeriein 1936; that for February 1936 contained the first appearance of “Continuity” (from Fungi from Yuggoth). In this same issue Edkins also wrote a brief review of The Cats of Ulthar(1935). HPL preserved all Edkins’s letters to him, but in his eloquent memoir “Idiosyncrasies of HPL” ( Olympian,Autumn 1940; in LR) Edkins notes that he lost most or all of HPL’s letters to him.

   See Rheinhart Kleiner, Ernest A.Edkins: A Memoir (Newtonville, Mass.: Oakwood Press, 1947).