TYPED LETTER SIGNED (TLS), 1 page, with handwritten postscript in green ink vertically along left margin, dated 21 August 1975, to "Dear Kirby" [McCauley], signed "E. H. P." On plain letter-size paper with his Redwood City, CA address rubber-stamped at top. The single-spaced typing looks like that of an old Royal manual, clogged keys and all. Price opens with news that Oswald Train has accepted "my Seabury Quinn sketch, introduction to ALIEN FLESH... He wondered whether I had any fantasy material." The remainder of the letter is largely devoted to Price's SILVER SERPENT, a fantasy novel set in the Tang dynasty, which McCauley was trying to sell. He discusses marketing and his sources for the novel: a libretto from the Pekin Opera Company; a Chinese novel translated by an associate of Price's; the performance of another Chinese opera, "White and Green," in San Francisco's Chinatown; and sundry bits of Chinese folklore. He compares his making a modern Western novel out of these raw materials to the process by which Bram Stoker made a modern novel out of bits of medieval vampire lore. The SILVER SERPENT was published as THE DEVIL WIVES OF LI-FONG (New York: Ballantine, 1979). Price was part of that generation of pulp fiction writers whose roots go back to the 1920s. He was on friendly terms with most of the others in that generation, including Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Many of his works had Oriental settings. He stopped writing for the pulps in the 1950s but resumed writing in the 1970s. Kirby McCauley was probably the most important literary agent of horror, fantasy and sf writers in the boom years of the 1970s and 1980s. Good content. Faint creases where folded for mailing, fine. (#102664).

Price: $200.00

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