"Sidelights"

Duane Rimel is a self-taught musician and writer, and an amateur anthropologist. He was a former correspondent of the late Howard P. Lovecraft, and the latter's letters to Rimel are in the Lovecraft collection at Brown University Library, some of which have been published.

Rimel wrote to CA: "H. P. Lovecraft had a tremendous influence during the short time of the correspondence, 1934-37, but I was much too young and immature at the time to appreciate it." He continued, "In the sixties a correspondence with August Derleth proved encouraging and enlightening, but the authors who influenced me most, just from reading them, are James Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell." His advice to aspiring writers is: "Make sure you have sufficient talent to succeed. Try a reliable agent." Of his own work he says: "I write best in the early morning, with lots of coffee and cigars. The only things I have written that I feel have any real artistic merit are several early weird poems. Much of the rest is commercial, some of it junk."