Virgil Warden Finlay

I’ve recently come into touch with Finlay, & find him a most unusual & brilliant character. He’s only 22, & a resident of his native city of Rochester, N.Y. He is a poet of no mean attainments as well as an artist—though of course pictorial art is his primary medium. In future years I feel certain that he will become an artist of distinction, so that the WT group will fee very proud of having known him in his youth.... All of Finlay’s WT work is good—especially the designs for your Lost Paradise & Bloch’s Faceless God. Bloch tells me that Wright considers the latter the finest illustration ever drawn for WT, & that the original hangs framed in the office.

—H.P. Lovecraft, carta a Catherine L. Moore (Octubre de 1936).

I liked the Finlay illustrations to my two tales —indeed, I believe Finlay is the best all-around artist Weird Tales has ever had. His drawing for the Doorstep was really an imaginative masterpiece. Wright has generously presented me with the originals of both Haunter and Doorstep pictures— and they far transcend the mechanical reproductions.

—H.P. Lovecraft, carta a James F. Morton (1937).