Edgar Hoffmann Price (1898–1988), who published as E. Hoffmann Price, was an American pulp fiction writer, among the most prolific and versatile contributors to the pulp magazine era and a key figure in the social and creative circle surrounding H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Born on 3 June 1898 in Fowler, California, he attended West Point briefly before serving as a field artillery officer in France during the First World War. He later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in chemical engineering — an unusual credential for a pulp writer, and one he drew on for technical color in some stories. He spent time as a soldier of fortune in Mexico and developed lifelong enthusiasms for the Middle East, fencing, weaponry, and Asian culture, all of which fed directly into his fiction. Price began publishing in the pulps in the 1920s and became a mainstay of Weird Tales, Spicy Adventure Stories, and Oriental Stories (later The Magic Carpet Magazine), among many other titles, through the 1930s to the 1950s. He wrote in nearly every popular pulp genre — weird fiction, adventure, detective, western, and spicy — often under pseudonyms. He is best known for the Pierre d'Artois occult detective stories, the Simon Bolivar Grimes adventure series, his extensive work in the Oriental adventure subgenre, and his collaboration with Lovecraft on Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934), a sequel to Lovecraft's The Silver Key that Price initiated and Lovecraft substantially rewrote. He was one of the few pulp writers to maintain close personal friendships across the Lovecraft circle, having met and visited Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith in person, unlike most of Lovecraft's correspondents, who knew him only by letter. His memoir Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers and Others, published posthumously in 1993, offers firsthand recollections of those writers and of the pulp world. As the pulp market collapsed in the 1950s he shifted to paperback originals and continued writing into the 1960s and 1970s, including work in science fiction and fantasy anthologies. He died on 18 June 1988 in Redwood City, California, remembered less for a single iconic creation than for his sheer range, his technical craftsmanship, and his role as a living link to the Weird Tales circle.
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