Leiber has testified frequently and eloquently to the importance of his brief but intense relationship with Lovecraft. Writing in 1958, he confessed: “Lovecraft is sometimes thought of as having been a lonely man. He made my life far less lonely, not only during the brief half year of our correspondence but during the twenty years after.”[39] Elsewhere he has even stated that Lovecraft was “the chiefest influence on my literary development after Shakespeare”[40]—a statement I shall want to examine more detailedly later. Here it can be said that Leiber is the one colleague of Lovecraft’s who
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