A plausible case could be made that Frank Belknap Long was H. P. Lovecraft’s best friend. Long knew Lovecraft for nearly two decades and saw him on a nearly daily basis during Lovecraft’s years in New York (1924–26). As this immense volume of the joint correspondence between the two men indicates, they shared similar views and tastes (a devotion to weird fiction, advances in science and philosophy) but also differed provocatively on many subjects. 

The result is an extraordinarily lively and substantial exchange of letters in which a wide array of topics is discussed in depth: the role of tradition in human culture; the place of religion in contemporary society; the “sense of place” each writer felt, the one for his native Providence, R.I., the other for New York; and much else. In addition, Lovecraft and Long were both involved in ghostwriting works for Zealia Bishop, and they conferred repeatedly about the ebbs and flows of the pulp magazine market. 

This volume brings to a conclusion the massive effort to publish the totality of Lovecraft’s extant correspondence. In each of these twenty-three volumes, editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi have consulted original manuscripts and have exhaustively annotated the letters to provide readers with a full understanding of the biographical and literary background of every document.