Episode 20 - A. Merritt's "Burn Witch, Burn!" with special guest Stephen Newton

Abraham Grace Merritt (better known by his byline A. Merritt) has the odd distinction of being perhaps second only to Edgar Rice Burroughs in popularity as a writer of fantastic fiction during the first half of the 20th century, only to be largely forgotten today. Perhaps this is because Merritt’s relatively small body of work didn’t feature recurring iconic heroes like John Carter of Mars or Conan of Cimmeria, or it may be down to his prose style’s reputation for being more baroque and densely descriptive than is the norm nowadays. Merritt came from a poor Quaker family, and financial difficulties forced his withdrawal from legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He landed a job at the age of 19 in 1903 as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, remaining a journalist for the rest of his life. Early in his career Merritt experienced or witnessed something (political corruption? heinous violence? eldritch horrors?) of which he never spoke again. Merritt was forced to lay low for a year in Mexico and Central America, where he visited many pre-Columbian sites and befriended the indigenous peoples. Merritt’s Latin American exile sparked in him a lifelong love of travel to exotic locales and a keen interest in the rituals and legends associated with those places. This anthropological eye would inform all of Merritt’s fiction, from his first published story “Through the Dragon Glass” (1917) to his final uncompleted novella “The Fox Woman” (first published in 1946). Merritt’s powers of imagination and description would inspire generations of writers of fantastic fiction, not least the “Big Three” of Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Unlike many of the Appendix N authors, Merritt did not need to survive on his fiction work since he was one of the best-paid journalists of his time--in 1912 he was tapped to be the assistant editor of The American Weekly and was earning $25,000 a year by 1919 (over $365,000 in 2017 dollars). Merritt served as the editor-in-chief of The American Weekly from 1937 until his death in 1943, by which time he was earning $100,000 a year (over $1.4 million in 2017 dollars). Merritt’s editorial responsibilities and his tendency to re-visit and rework his stories meant that he only completed 8 novels and 7 short stories in his lifetime. But regardless of whether Merritt’s commitment to The American Weekly limited his fantastic fiction output, his time there was well-spent as it also allowed him to champion and hire Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, two up-and-coming artists who would become among the greatest of the pulp era. Both Finlay and Bok would go on to illustrate many of Merritt’s stories and Bok was given permission to complete and publish two unfinished Merritt novellas, The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda (New Collectors Group, 1946) and The Black Wheel (New Collectors Group, 1947). Merritt’s second to last novel, Burn, Witch, Burn! was originally serialized in 6 parts in Argosy Weekly magazine in the fall of 1932 and compiled in hardcover the following year by Liveright, Inc. It’s a mark of Merritt’s literary respectability at the time that he shared the same publisher as Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, and E.E. Cummings among others.