author
Elizabeth Virginia Raplee
1900–1982
Best remembered for the eerie poem "To a Skull on My Bookshelf," this American writer published verse in popular magazines as well as pulp fiction. Little biographical detail survives, which gives her small body of work an added air of mystery.
1 Audiobook
To a Skull on My Bookshelf
by Elizabeth Virginia Raplee
About the author
Elizabeth Virginia Raplee was an American poet and writer born in 1900 and dead in 1982. Public-domain library records connect her most clearly with "To a Skull on My Bookshelf," a poem published in Weird Tales in October 1937 and later preserved by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource.
Wikisource also lists other magazine publications, including "The Poet Considers Perfection" in Good Housekeeping in 1939 and "The Call" in Good Housekeeping in 1942. Those credits suggest a writer who moved between the strange, atmospheric world of pulp magazines and the more mainstream pages of a major American household magazine.
Much of Raplee's life remains hard to document from readily available sources, so the work itself is still the main way readers meet her. That scarcity makes her especially interesting to listeners who enjoy rediscovering overlooked early-20th-century authors.