Serious literary artists such T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf loom large in most accounts of the literary art of the first half of the 20th century. And yet, working in the shadows casts by these modernists were science fiction, horror, and fantasy writers like "the Weird Tales Three": H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. These three writers did not publish in artistically ambitious little magazines like The Dial, The Smart Set and The Little Review, but instead in commercial pulp magazines like Weird Tales. Contrary to stereotypes about pulp fiction and those who wrote it, however, the Weird Tales Three were serious literary artists that used their fiction to speculate about philosophical questions, the function of art, and the brevity of life.