Henry St. Clair Whitehead was an American Episcopal clergyman and writer of weird fiction, born in 1882 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and died in 1932. He attended Harvard University, where he studied alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt and was noted as a class poet, and after a period working in business he turned to the ministry, training at Berkeley Divinity School and being ordained an Episcopal priest. His clerical career took him to the Virgin Islands, where he served for years, eventually as Archdeacon, and it was this Caribbean posting that shaped his fiction most distinctively. Living among the islands' Afro-Caribbean communities gave him direct exposure to obeah, voodoo, and local folk belief, material he wove into his horror stories with an authenticity uncommon among his pulp contemporaries. He became a member of the informal circle of writers surrounding H. P. Lovecraft, corresponding with Lovecraft and collaborating with him on stories such as "The Trap" and "The Horror in the Museum," the latter substantially written by Lovecraft from Whitehead's premise. Whitehead published prolifically in pulp magazines, above all Weird Tales, and his best-known tales, including "Jumbee," "The Black Beast," and "Passing of a God," draw heavily on West Indian settings and lore. He died relatively young, in 1932, from complications of kidney disease. His work was later gathered posthumously by Arkham House in the collection Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales, which secured his reputation as an important, if lesser-known, figure in early twentieth-century American weird fiction, particularly for his role in bringing Caribbean folklore, and by extension zombie and voodoo themes, into the genre.
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