Orville R. Emerson

Orville R. Emerson is credited with one story in Weird Tales: “The Grave,” printed in the magazine’s inaugural issue in March 1923. The contents page and the story’s own byline agree on the name. A later specialist account identifies Emerson as a teacher, soldier, author and attorney, born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1894 and deceased in 1945. It also traces his single contribution to the first issue and its later selection for an anthology devoted to the magazine’s 1923 fiction.

“The Grave” is built around a manuscript found after the First World War. Its inset account places a group of soldiers in Flanders and follows the narrator’s encounter with an apparently living man in a trench. The story connects a wartime setting with the issue’s early interest in horror and the uncanny, although the credited text is more accurately a war story than a supernatural biography of its author. The printed record says little about Emerson’s writing beyond this one appearance. His page therefore distinguishes the facts of his life, supplied by later research, from the plot and imagery of the story that bears his byline.