Biography of Adolphe Danziger

wpe5.gif (83552 bytes) Adolphe Danziger was a protege to Ambrose Bierce in the early 1890's. Danziger worked as the publisher for Bierce's Beetles in Black Amber in which Bierce plied his trade at attacking San Francisco society member he thought had acted unintelligently. In 1893 they collaborated on the novella The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter. I've described that story and many of Danziger's other writing in an annotated bibliography. Danziger was also connected with horror genre writer H. P. Lovecraft. I was fortunate enough to get to edit a few pages about Danziger from the excellent biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, and the author S. T. Joshi gave me a brief credit. This collaboration resulted in Joshi publishing my article, "The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro" in Lovecraft Studies, a journal he edits.

Typical of Danziger, the photo, from his book Portrait of Ambrose Bierce, is dated in 1908, at which time he was in Europe and couldn't have been photographed in California. I date it as mid- to late-April, 1906, shortly after the San Francisco earthquake. It apparently shows Danziger simultaneously celebrating the "loss" of his wife and children in the earthquake and mourning the loss of his extensive library and correspondence. Fortunately for the others concerned, "lost" meant only that they couldn't find him when he skipped to New York. Mrs. Danziger lived in San Francisco at least until the early 1920's. Danziger remarried in 1907 in Switzerland, apparently without first divorcing the first Mrs. Danziger.