Weird Tales - Farnsworth Wright

Farnsworth Wright

The publisher then gave the job to Farnsworth Wright, who became the magazine's best-known editor. Wright (who suffered from Parkinson's disease) continued to publish stories by Lovecraft, Smith, and Quinn, though he was more selective than Baird; he rejected Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and (initially) "The Call of Cthulhu", among other stories. Many of Smith's Hyperborean cycle stories were rejected as well.

Among the new writers Wright found for the magazine were Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard, whose Conan the Barbarian stories, among many others, were hugely popular. Wright put playwright Tennessee Williams into print for the first time (with his story "The Vengeance of Nitocris"). Edmond Hamilton's earliest science fiction stories also first appeared in Wright's Weird Tales.

Notably, Wright hired the former fashion designer and illustrator Margaret Brundage to produce the magazine's cover illustrations, starting in 1933—making Brundage the only female cover artist of the pulp era. She created many striking images, especially of nude or semi-nude young women in provocative poses (her whipping scenes attracted the highest attention). Though her art was far from flawless, Brundage's covers became a focus of extreme attention and controversy—which of course helped to sell the magazine. Wright also ignited the careers of two important fantasy artists, Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, by buying and publishing their work, first and frequently.

Weird Tales always struggled financially. In the 1920s and 1930s, the magazine's business manager, William Sprenger, was crucial in keeping the enterprise afloat. It is estimated that the monthly circulation of Weird Tales never topped 50,000 copies per issue. (In the 1920s, circulation figures for the most successful pulps topped one million; even in the depths of the Great Depression, popular pulps like Doc Savage or The Shadow enjoyed circulations of 300,000 per issue, monthly or even semi-monthly.) After 1926, Farnsworth Wright paid his contributors at the rate of one cent per word, double the going pulp rate of a half-cent per word; but during the 1930s, the magazine was sometimes very late in making its payments to authors (which was not unusual in the pulp field as a whole, at the time).

In 1938, Henneberger sold Weird Tales to William J. Delaney, owner and publisher of the magazine Short Stories. Davis brought in Dorothy McIlwraith (1891-1976), the editor of Short Stories, to assist Wright. A period of policy clashes and declining sales led to Wright's departure from Weird Tales in March 1940. Wright died in June of that year.