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Fritz Leiber's apparently startling remark that H. P. Lovecraft was "the chiefest influence on my literary development after Shakespeare" (cited in Byfield 1 1) may perhaps be less puzzling if we interpret the statement absolutely literally; for Leiber's emphasis here may be on the word development, and if this is the case, then it suggests that Lovecraft's own work - as well as his brief but intense correspondence with Leiber in 1936-37 - provided Leiber with suggestions as to the improvement of the style, plotting, motivation, and conception of his early tales, and that these suggestions held Leiber in good stead throughout the subsequent course of his long and fruitful career. It is a truism that Leiber, perhaps alone of Lovecraft's literary associates, did not imitate Lovecraft either stylistically or thematically - except in the late work, "The Terror from the Depths" (1976), commissioned for a volume of pastiches of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" - but instead struck out on his own right from the beginning of his career. This aesthetic independence has been a major reason for the survival of Leiber's work while that of other, more derivative writers has achieved merited oblivion; but that Lovecraft taught Leiber much about the craft of writing is evident both in Leiber's several insightful critical essays on Lovecraft and in his early tales, especially those gathered in his first collection, Night 's Black Agents (1947).
Leiber wrote four important essays on Lovecraft, all of which are handily gathered in the collection Fafhrd & Me (1990). They are: "A Literary Copernicus" (1949); "My Correspondence with Lovecraft" (1958); "The 'Whisperer' Re-examined" (1964); and "Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin" (1966). There are some lesser articles - among them "Lovecraft in My Life" (1976) and his contributions to H. P. Lovecraft: A Symposium (1963) - but the above four embody Leiber's most significant thought on Lovecraft. Aside from the light they shed on Leiber's own work, they are among the most perspicacious pieces ever written on Lovecraft; many believe that "A Literary Copernicus" may still be the finest single article on Lovecraft to date. All these essays reveal how carefully Leiber had absorbed the essence of Lovecraft's work at a relatively early stage in his career.
"A Literary Copernicus," written for Something...