Editing Frank Belknap Long (section)

===Early life===
He was born in [[Manhattan]], New York City on April 27, 1901.<ref>Peter Cannon. "Frank Belknap Long: When Was he Born and Why Was Lovecraft Wrong?" Studies in Weird Fiction 17 (Summer 1995): 33-34.</ref> He grew up in the [[Harlem]] area of Manhattan. His father was a prosperous dentist and his mother was [[May Doty]]. The family resided at 823 [[West End Avenue]] in Manhattan. Long's father was a keen fisher and hunter, and Long accompanied the family on annual summer vacations from the age of six months to 17, usually in the [[Thousand Islands]] region on the Canadian shore, about seven miles from the village of [[Gananoque]]. When he was three years old, on one of these vacations, Long fell into the river at the end of a long pier and contracted pneumonia<ref>Frank Belknap Long, ''Autobiographical Memoir''. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 198, pp3-06</ref>

A lifelong resident of New York City, Long was educated in the [[New York City Department of Education|New York City public school system]]. As a boy he was fascinated by [[natural history]], and wrote that he dreamed of running "away from home and explore the great [[rain forest]]s of the [[Amazon Basin|Amazon]]." He developed his interest in the weird by reading the [[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz|Oz]] books, [[Jules Verne]], and [[H.G. Wells]] as well as [[Ambrose Bierce]] and [[Edgar Allan Poe]]. Though writing was to be his life's work, he once commented that as "important as writing is, I could have been completely happy if I had a secure position in a field that has always had a tremendous emotion and an imaginative appeal for me&mdash;that of natural history."

In his late teens, he was active in the United [[Amateur Press Association]] (UAPA) in which he won a prize from ''The Boy's World'' (around 1919) and thus discovered amateur journalism. His first published tale was "Dr Whitlock's Price (''United Amateur'', March 1920). Long's story "The Eye Above the Mantel" (1921), a pastiche of [[Edgar Allan Poe]], in UAPA, caught the eye of [[H. P. Lovecraft]], sparking a friendship and correspondence that would endure until Lovecraft's death in 1937.

Long attended [[New York University]] from 1920 to 1921, studying [[journalism]] but later transferred to Columbia, leaving without a degree. In 1921, he suffered a severe attack of [[appendicitis]], leading to a [[ruptured appendix]] and [[peritonitis]]. He spent a month in New York's [[Roosevelt Hospital]], where he came close to dying. Long's brush with death propelled him into a decision that he would leave college to pursue a [[freelance writing]] career.