William Buehler Seabrook died by his own hand on this date in 1945. As is so often noted in capsule biographies around the Net, Seabrook was "an American Lost Generation occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist." He was also an alcoholic, a bondage fetishist and a pretty good wordsmith. One could say he was the Hunter S. Thompson of the interwar period.

Seabrook was born in Maryland in 1884. He began his career as a reporter for several newspapers. However, when World War One broke out--and before the USA entered the conflict--he volunteered for the American Field Service of the French Army. He served as an ambulance driver ferrying the wounded from the trenches. In 1916, he was gassed during the horrific Battle of Verdun. He later received the Croix de Guerre for his wartime service. After being gassed, WBS was invalided out, at which point he began writing for The New York Times.

It's hard to know how much his experiences changed Seabrook. We do know that he spent a lot of time in Europe, hanging out with "Lost Generation" expatriates and Euro-literati. All the while, he maintained a farm in Georgia and a flat in New York. William--or "Willie", which was what he usually went by--quickly moved up to fairly rarefied social circles for a preacher's kid from Westminster, Maryland. He hobnobbed with the likes of Gertrude Stein, George Gurdjieff, Horace Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Man Ray and others. He even ended up smoking opium with Princess Violette Murat. By all accounts, Seabrook was a very charming guy...when he wasn't a mean drunk.

His--newfound?--interest in the occult led him to a meeting with Aleister Crowley in 1919, which took place at Willie's farm in Georgia. Seabrook would go on to become one of the main journalists writing about Crowley during the early interwar period, attending several "hashish orgies" at Crowley's pad in NYC.

Seabrook’s dalliances with the occult provided ready fodder for weird fiction. He wrote a handful of such tales, one of which appeared in the Dashiell Hammett-edited Creeps by Night. Another, “Toussel's Pale Bride”, appeared in The Supernatural Omnibus, edited by none other than Montague Summers. After his death, Seabrook’s “The Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban” was published in And the Darkness Falls alongside classics by Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft.

However, Seabrook also liked to travel and he knew American readers had an insatiable lust for travel tales from exotic locales. He aimed to scratch that itch.

In 1924, Willie and his wife headed to "Arabia". Not the newly formed kingdom of Saudi Arabia. More like the northern half of the Arabia Deserta of the Roman Empire. The Seabrooks would end up hanging out with Bedouin in northern Saudi Arabia, Druses in the Lebanon Mountains, Dervishes in Syria and Yezidis in northern Iraq. Willie's travelogue, Adventures in Arabia, was published in 1927 to acclaim and commercial success.

With more traveling money, Seabrook struck while the iron was hot, heading to exotic, voodoo-haunted Haiti. The resulting travelogue, The Magic Island, was a smash hit when it was published in 1929, selling over half a million copies by 1930.

While some internet articles try to claim that The Magic Island "introduced" the concept of zombies to the American public, it would be more accurate to say that Willie's book "popularized" the idea. Zombies had figured in Anglophone literature for over a century. Seabrook's sensationalistic--but highly readable--book made zombies a full-fledged cultural meme. Movies like White Zombie followed soon after. For a well-researched series of articles on the rise of zombies in American culture—especially in regard to the pulps— check out this link.

Major success hit Seabrook hard. His drinking reached a new level. In 1933, he checked himself into a sanitarium and came out sober six months later. His book about it, Asylum, was basically written as an "inner" travelogue. A bestseller, it was praised by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is now considered a classic "rehab" memoir.

Seabrook's sobriety wasn't a full reset. He still had plenty of bad habits and also eventually relapsed into alcoholism. His wife from that period later wrote quite the memoir about it in 1966.

Divorced for the third time, drinking again and without a big hit since Asylum, Seabrook committed suicide on this date in 1945. Upon hearing the news, Crowley wrote an entry in his diary: “The swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last…”

Seabrook’s suicide was just the final similarity between him and Ernest Hemingway. Both served in WWI, both had similar social circles, both made several trips to Africa…and so on. However, I’ve been able to find no solid connection betwixt the two other than the fact that Hemingway owned Seabrook’s autobiography and also Willie’s book on witchcraft. Both were written late in WBS’ career. One would think that Hemingway might’ve been interested in some of the earlier travelogues. There is no record of the two men knowing each other that I’m aware of.

So why have I regaled you all with such a sad, sordid and tawdry tale? Because Seabrook was definitely an influence on the weird fictioneers of the '20s and '30s. As Benjamin Welton points out in this article, E. Hoffman Price was a fan of WBS. We know from Lovecraft’s letters that he had read The Magic Island while visiting Henry S. Whitehead in 1931. Whitehead had somewhat anticipated the zombie fever of the ‘30s, writing pulp tales of Caribbean horror before The Magic Island was ever published. It would be only natural for him to buy Seabrook’s tome and then let HPL read it while visiting in Florida.

Finally, we have this quote from Robert E. Howard to HPL in May of 1936:

"You ought to read ... some of Seabrook's travel books if you want to get a realistic view of French colonial policy."

What that quote indicates is REH had read at least two of Seabrook's books. The likelihood is that Howard read far more than two. Discounting Asylum, we have these books published by May, 1936: Adventures in Arabia (1927), The Magic Island (1929), Jungle Ways (1931), Air Adventure; From Paris to the Sahara Desert and Timbuctoo (1933), The White Monk of Timbuctoo (1934).

The first edition of Adventures in Arabia. — The first edition of *Adventures in Arabia*.

Obvious influences from Adventures in Arabia would be REH's portrayal of Yezidis in "The Brazen Peacock", "Dig Me No Grave" and "Three-Bladed Doom". He appears to have taken Seabrook's account of the Druses and used it in "The Lord of the Dead". Willie's sojourns with the Bedouin also probably influenced Howard.

Howard wrote several tales involving voodoo, all of them written in 1930 or later. We might not have "Pigeons from Hell" without Seabrook's influence.

Jungle Ways is famous for its account of Sub-Saharan African cannibalism. I would tend to think REH read this because of his comment to Lovecraft, since some of it takes place in French colonial Africa.

Air Adventure; From Paris to the Sahara Desert and Timbuctoo and The White Monk of Timbuctoo also fit into the "French colonial" frame that Howard mentioned. I have to wonder if Seabrook's accounts of the Sahara and Timbuktu influenced Bob somewhat when it came to writing "Xuthal of the Dusk" and the "Tombalku Fragment".

As a final note regarding Seabrook's influence upon sword and sorcery, I mailed Adventures in Arabia to Scott Oden as reading material while he was writing Lion of Cairo.

Summing it up, Seabrook might not have been the finest human being to ever walk up and down in this world, but he could tell a hell of a travel-tale. Also, zombies.

Dustjacket for the first edition of The Magic Island. — Dustjacket for the first edition of *The Magic Island*.