Tuesday, January 20, 2015
A. Merritt: Forgotten Father
Forgotten Father: The tastes of one generation are not necessarily those of another and literature is no more exempt from the alienating power of time than any other form of art. Realizing this doesn’t make it any less surprising when one encounters an artist wildly popular in his own day but largely unknown in the present. Such an artist was Abraham Grace Merritt, who was born today in 1884.
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4 comments:
Many years ago my 7th-grade science teacher loaned me a copy of DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE, and I was hooked but good. It took me another dozen years to collect all of Merritt's other works, but--though I recognize his flaws--I remain a dyed-in-the-wool Merritt fan, now with a half-dozen or more first editions, and I expect to remain one for the rest of my life. He had a touch of shadowy magic that none who came before or since have equalled.
I loved his novels when I was a teen, but I haven't read one since. I'm sometimes tempted, but so far I've resisted. I don't want to be disappointed.
BURN WITCH BURN still creeps me out. Try it Bill, you won't be disappointed.
Merritt had a pretty good run in the '60s and '70s on the coattails of the Burroughs boom, but aside from DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE and SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN, I never got much into his stuff. Henry Kuttner's and Jack Williamson's Merritt pastiches were better than the original, I thought.
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