Harold Warner Munn (November 5, 1903 – January 10, 1981) was an American writer of fantasy, horror and poetry,[1] best remembered for his early stories in Weird Tales.
He has been described by fellow author Jessica Amanda Salmonson, who interviewed him during 1978, as "the ultimate gentleman" and "a gentle, calm, warm, and good friend."
Also in his library were books consisting of serialized stories from magazines, notably works by George Allan England such as "Darkness and Dawn".
The plots of the Werewolf Clan tales revolved between the struggle between the titular family and "The Master", a supernatural villain that Munn based on Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer.
On publication (Weird Tales, 1936) it was compared favorably to the stories of Robert E. Howard, of whose fiction Munn confessed to being a great admirer.
The novel starts in the last days of King Arthur, and follows the adventures of Myrdhinn (Merlin) and a Roman centurion, who leave Britain for new lands to the West, and find themselves in the kingdom of the Aztecs.
With the exception of the 1980 epic historical novel, The Lost Legion, his post-Weird Tales output was minor, most of it either self-published in small press editions or issued haphazardly by publishers who sought him.
Reprising Wollheim's role, Lin Carter, editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, learned of it while enquiring about the availability of the first two Merlin books.
Robert E. Weinberg was responsible for the revival and completion of the Werewolf Clan stories when he expressed an interest in reprinting them in his periodical Lost Fantasies.
Munn had originally written eight werewolf stories for Weird Tales before its change of editorship; he now wrote two more to fill gaps in the sequence, and the entire series appeared in three parts in Lost Fantasies, nos.
He developed a new sequence that sought to link Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories with an Arthur Machen-esque ancient race of Pictish fairies.
H. Warner Munn was a Founding Syndic, with John Charles Moran, Don Herron, and Donald Sidney-Fryer, of The F. Marion Crawford Memorial Society (Nashville) in 1975.
He was mentioned in S01E08 (originally broadcast 5 April 1998) of the British comedy series This Morning With Richard Not Judy in an installment of the running joke Men of Achievement 1974.