Edgar Hoffmann Price (July 3, 1898 – June 18, 1988) was an American writer of popular fiction (he was a self-titled "fictioneer") for the pulp magazine marketplace. He collaborated with H. P. Lovecraft on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". Biography Price was born at Fowler, California. During his early years, he became interested in China as a result of his interactions with a Chinese salesman in his hometown. As a form of punishment, his mother once threatened to leave Price with him. He did not see this as a punishment. His interest in China also had a sexual aspect. His wife later noted that "Oriental women fascinate [him]". Originally intending to be a career soldier, Price graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He served with the American military in Mexico and the Philippines, before being sent to France with the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. After returning to the United States, he moved to Manhattan and began to write for pulp magazines. He was a champion fencer and boxer, an amateur Orientalist, and a student of the Arabic language; science-fiction author Jack Williamson, in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child, called E. Hoffmann Price a "real live soldier of fortune". In his literary career, Hoffmann Price produced fiction for a wide range of publications, from Argosy to Terror Tales, from Speed Detective to Spicy Mystery Stories. Yet he was most readily identified as a Weird Tales writer, one of the group who wrote regularly for editor Farnsworth Wright, a group that included Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline, and his works with Lovecraft, noted above. His first sale was to Droll Stories in 1924, followed almost immediately by the first of scores of acceptances by Weird Tales, "The Rajah's Gift" (January 1925). "The Stranger from Kurdistan", published in 1925, was another early story to appear in Weird Tales. This story which featured a dialogue between a certain personage and Satan, was criticised by some readers as blasphemous but proved popular with Weird Tales readers. (Lovecraft professed to find it especially powerful). "The Infidel's Daughter" (1927), a satire on the Ku Klux Klan, also angered some Southern readers, but Wright defended the story. Price worked in a range of popular genres—including