(1882-1932)
One of the most frequent contributors to the legendary Weird Tales magazine in its first decade, Henry Whitehead was also the most distinguished and most unlikely of contributors to that strange and often unsavory publication. Whitehead was a graduate of Harvard University who studied under the American poet and philosopher George San-tayana and earned a doctorate in philosophy. He became an ordained minister, then priest, and served in a series of increasingly responsible positions in the church, from rector and children’s pastor to his final post as archdeacon to the Virgin Islands.
As a sideline, he wrote of ecclesiastical matters at first, then switched to fiction. “The Intarsia Box” appeared in Adventure in 1923. His initial appearance in Weird Tales—a story called “Tea Leaves”—was in the first-anniversary issue of that magazine. He became a regular contributor until his early death in 1932. Doctor Whitehead’s observations and investigations of the folklore and superstition of the Virgin Islands and adjacent isles were put to good use in his stories of Caribbean ghosts and haunting legends. Whitehead’s alter-ego character, Gerald Canevin, narrates many of the stories. With a diocese to answer to, White-head’s weird tales were not among the magazine’s more lurid or grotesque offerings, but were—in H. E lovecraft’s words—”subtle, realistic and quietly potent.”
Works
- “Fireplace, The” (1925);
- “Intarsia Box, The” (1923);
- “Jumbee” (1926);
- Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944);
- “Tea Leaves” (1924)
