Readers of Weird Tales will be grieved to hear of the death of that distinguished author, the Reverend Henry S. Whitehead, Ph.D., who was a regular contributor to this magazine. His death was caused by a painful gastric illness of more than two years’ duration.

Dr. Whitehead, descended paternally from an old Virginian family and maternally from a noted line of Scottish West Indian planters, was born in 1882 in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. As a boy he attended the Berkeley School in New York City, and in 1904 graduated from Harvard University, a classmate of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Studying under men like Santayana and Münsterberg, he later took his, degree as Doctor of Philosophy.’ His first literary work was published in 1905, and from that time he was an increasingly well-known writer in many fields.

In 1912, having graduated from the Berkeley Divinity School, Dr. Whitehead was ordained a deacon of the Episcopal Church; and was advanced to the priesthood in 1913. From 1913 to 1917 he was rector of Christ Church in Middletown, Connecticut, and was later children’s pastor at St. Mary the Virgin’s in New York City. During 1919–23 he was senior assistant at the Church of the Advent in Boston, and in 1923–5 was rector of Trinity Church at Bridgeport, Connecticut. Subsequently Dr. Whitehead served as acting archdeacon in the Virgin Islands, where he had previously served several winters in a similar capacity.

As an author Dr. Whitehead specialised in fiction, though writing much on ecclesiastical and other subjects. Beginning in 1923, when his story, “The Intarsia Box” in Adventure), received a first-class rating as a story of distinction from the O. Henry Memorial Committee, many similar honours were accorded his work. In 1927 he contributed to the Free Lance Writers’ Handbook an article on the technique of weird fiction which is still a standard text on the subject.

It is for weird fiction of a subtle, realistic, and quietly potent sort that he will be best remembered by readers of this magazine, in which twenty-five of his greatest tales have been published. Deeply versed in the sombre folklore of the West Indies, and of the Virgin Islands in particular, he caught the inmost spirit of the native superstitions and wrote them into tales whose accurate local background created an astonishing illusion of genuineness. His “jumbee” stories—popularly so-called because of their frequent inclusion of a typical Virgin Island belief—form a permanent contribution to spectral literature, while his recurrent central character and narrator, “Gerald Canevin” (embodying much of his own personality), will always be recalled as a lifelike and lovable figure.

Prominent among Dr. Whitehead’s tales are “Sea Change”, “Jumbee”, “The Tree Man”, “Black Tancrede”, “Hill Drums”, and “Passing of a God”—the latter perhaps representing the peak of his creative genius.