Starrett, [Charles] Vincent

   (1886–1974)

   American bookman, journalist, and brief correspondent of HPL. Starrett was put in touch with HPL by Frank Belknap Long. Starrett was passing through New York in the spring of 1927, and Long gave him two of HPL’s stories to read. Starrett was a well-known journalist (he wrote a weekly column on books for the Chicago Tribunefrom 1942 until his death) and the American advocate of Arthur Machen (he wrote the short treatise Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin [1918] and edited two collections of Machen’s miscellaneous work, The Shining Pyramid [1923] and The Glorious Mystery [1927]). Starrett was impressed with HPL’s tales and wrote to him about them. Starrett also found much merit in HPL’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as published in the Reclusein the summer of 1927. The correspondence ceased by the end of the year. Starrett also published a few weird tales, some in WT;they are collected in The Quick and the Dead (Arkham House, 1965). After HPL’s death Starrett took note of several of HPL’s volumes in his Tribunecolumn, reviewing Beyond the Wall of Sleep (January 2, 1944), Marginalia (March 4, 1945), Something about Cats (December 18, 1949), and The Shuttered Room (January 10, 1960); the first two of these are reprinted in his Books and Bipeds (1947). In the first of these reviews he made the memorable, if not entirely accurate, comment: “he was his own most fantastic creation—a Roderick Usher or C. Auguste Dupin born a century too late.”

   See Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman: The Life and Times of Vincent Starrett (1968).