Читать книгу The Sinister Painting - Greye La Spina - Страница 4

Greye La Spina (1880–1969) was an American writer who published more than one hundred short stories, serials, novelettes, and one-act plays. Her stories appeared in Metropolitan, Black Mask, Action Stories, Ten-Story Book, The Thrill Book, Modern Marriage, Top-Notch Magazine, All-Story, Photoplay, and many other magazines—but most especially in Weird Tales, alongside such masters of fantasy and horror as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, and so many others. Indeed, it is for these tales of weird fantasy that she is remembered today.

La Spina was born Fanny Greye Bragg on July 10, 1880, in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Her father was a Methodist clergyman. She was married to Ralph Geissler in 1898 and gave birth to a daughter, Celia, two years later. The following year, her husband died. In 1910 she married Baron Robert La Spina, an Italian aristocrat.

Her first supernatural story, “The Wolf on the Steppes” was sold to The Thrill Book in 1919. She won second place in Photoplay magazine’s 1921 short story contest, winning a $2,500 prize. Her first book, Invaders from the Dark, was published by Arkham House in 1960. It collected her supernatural fiction.

“The Sinister Painting” first appeared in Weird Tales in September, 1934—a fine issue, featuring contributions by Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Howard Wandrei, and August Derleth, among many others.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland