The story was written in the course of an all-night tour of the antiquities of the New York metropolitan area. By 7 A.M. on August 11, HPL had reached Elizabeth, N.J., by ferry. There he purchased a 10¢ composition book at a shop, went to Scott Park, and wrote the story. The actual location of the story is Greenwich Village; specifically, a courtyard off Perry Street that HPL had explored the previous August in response to an article on it (in a regular column, “Little Sketches about Town”) in the New York Evening Post(August 29, 1924). His description of the courtyard is quite accurate. Moreover, HPL probably knew that the area had been heavily settled by Indians (they had named it Sapohanican) and that a sumptuous mansion was built in the block bounded by Perry, Charles, Bleecker, and West Fourth Streets sometime between 1726 and 1744, being the residence of a succession of wealthy citizens until it was razed in 1865. This is clearly the manor house of the archaic gentleman. The vision of past and future New York as seen in the window of the house may have been derived from Lord Dunsany’s picaresque novel The Chronicles of Rodriguez(1922), in which Rodriguez and a companion make an arduous climb of a mountain to the house of a wizard, who in alternate windows unveils vistas of wars past and to come.
See S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft and Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez,” CryptNo. 82 (Hallowmas 1992): 3–6; Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., “Lovecraft’s ‘He,’” LSNo. 37 (Fall 1997): 17–25.
Heald, Hazel (1896–1961).
Revision client of HPL, residing in Somerville, Mass. According to Muriel E.Eddy ( The Gentleman from Angell Street[1961]),
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Heald was a member of a New England writers’ club that Mrs. Eddy had begun; sometime in 1932 Mrs. Eddy introduced Heald to HPL, having read “The Man of Stone,” which she found poorly written but with an interesting plot. Although other parts of Mrs. Eddy’s memoir appear falsified or erroneous, nothing in HPL’s letters contradicts this account; HPL, in fact, never mentions how he first came to know Heald. HPL eventually revised five stories for her—“The Man of Stone,” “Winged Death,” “The Horror in the Museum,” “Out of the Aeons,” and “The Horror in the Burying-Ground”— most of them in 1932–33. (See entries on individual stories for details of publication and other particulars.) Four of the stories feature an element in common: a human being who is either dead or immobilized but whose brain is alive (“Winged Death” features a man whose brain or personality ends up in the body of an insect). Mrs. Eddy suggests that Heald, a divorcee, was romantically attracted to HPL and that she once invited him to a candlelight dinner in Somerville; in his memoir W.Paul Cook notes that after his trip to Quebec in the summer of 1932, HPL stopped to visit him in Athol, Mass., and that “he was going to take a midnight bus to Providence after dinner in Somerville” (Cook does not mention Heald in his account). HPL himself does not seem to have been particularly attracted to Heald. Heald did not keep her letters from HPL.
Heaton,———.
In “The Mound,” a young man who in 1891 goes to the mound region in Oklahoma looking for treasure but returns with his mind shattered by something he has seen. He dies eight years later in an epileptic fit.
Henneberger, J[acob] C[lark] (1890–1969).
Magazine publisher who, with J.M.Lansinger, founded Rural Publications, Inc., in 1922, to publish a variety of popular magazines. Henneberger achieved great success with the magazine College Humor (begun in 1922), and now envisioned founding a line of varied periodicals in the detective and horror fields. Having received assurances from such established writers as Hamlin Garland and Ben Hecht that they would be willing to contribute stories of an “unconventional” sort to a new magazine, Henneberger started WTin March 1923; but in the end these and other wellknown authors did not submit to the magazine, leaving its early issues open to many tyros and amateurs. Henneberger installed Edwin Baird as his first editor, and the latter accepted all five of the stories HPL submitted to him in May 1923. Henneberger commissioned HPL to ghostwrite “Under the Pyramids” for Harry Houdini, paying him $100 upon receipt of the manuscript in early March 1924. By this time, however, the magazine was in serious financial trouble; it and its companion, Detective Tales,were now $40,000 in debt. For this and other reasons, HPL turned down Henneberger’s offer to be the new editor of the magazine; specifically, HPL, newly married and settled in Brooklyn, did not wish to pull up stakes and move to Chicago to edit the magazine, as would have been required. Henneberger then sold off his share of Detective Talesto Lansinger, appointed Farnsworth Wright as editor of WT, and came to an agreement with B. Cornelius, the printer of the magazine, whereby Cornelius would be the chief stockholder with an agreement that if the $40,000 owed him was ever repaid by profits from the magazine, the stock would be returned to Henneberger. This
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never happened. In the fall of 1924 Henneberger provisionally hired HPL to edit a new humor magazine that he was planning (possibly titled the Magazine of Fun) at $40 per week; HPL spent the next several weeks preparing jokes for the magazine, but it never got off the ground. Henneberger gave HPL a credit of $60 at the Scribner Book Shop; although HPL attempted to have the credit converted to cash, he was unable to do so, and so he and Frank Belknap Long selected a large number of books (see SL1.355–56). Henneberger sporadically communicated with HPL over the next few years, but to no particular effect. See Henneberger’s late memoir, “Out of Space, Out of Time,” Deeper Than You Think1, No. 2 (July 1968): 3–5.
“Herbert West—Reanimator.”
Short story (12,100 words); written from early October 1921 to mid-June 1922. First published as a serial (under the title “Grewsome Tales”) in Home Brew(February, March, April, May, June, and July 1922); rpt. WT(March, July, September, November 1942, September, November 1943); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2and CC.