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Posted on 07/24/2025 3:27:29 PM PDT by kawhill
H. P. Lovecraft was many things: a recluse, a virulently xenophobic racist, and arguably the most influential figure in modern horror fiction.
(Excerpt) Read more at thoughtco.com ...
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The best.
RE: a recluse, a virulently xenophobic racist...
An all around fun guy.
“The kind of personality of someone who can liven up a party simply by leaving it.”
——Arthur C. Clarke on the American astronauts in the early space program.
Cthulhu Mythos
One of the other major writers of the Weird Tales magazine group was Robert E. Howard. After writing of prize fighters and the big muscled heroic creations Conan the Barbarian, Kull and others, Howard was told by doctors that his beloved mother was going into her last days with no hope for recovery from a coma.
In the hospital parking lot he opened the glove compartment of his car and took out a revolver and shot himself in the head because he couldn’t face life without his mother.
Given that one race in particular seems to be more trouble than it's worth and that the World would be better off with one religion in particular (Islam) I might tend to agree.
His writing is terrible. Had he ever met another person?
I just LOVED this guy’s stuff when I was a prepubescent nerd. I bought paperbacks, was given a few by a friend after he read them, borrowed them from the city library (St. Petersburg, FL). Between his work and Robert E. Howard (L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Michael Moorcock later) and a few other names I no longer remember, I read and read and read and then discovered Robert H. Heinlein when I was 15 and “horror” and “fantasy” took a distant second to Science Fiction. It wasn’t the “monster”/“other world” aliens that I found interesting so much as the creation of the genre itself; Lovecraft’s story “The Thing in the Cave” scared me SO much when I was twelve (HPL wrote it when he was younger than that, nine, IIRC) I only ever went into a cave TWICE in my life. I’m not claustrophobic, I’m “thing-o-phobic.” If you know the story, you know.
*shudder*
Oh, of course,I read Plato, Socrates, the major philosophers (I liked Camus and Sartre - a little less), Hesse’s Siddharta (and others, and later, Noch einmal auf Deutsch) and of course I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Iliad, Odyssey, many other classics.
It was a good time. I wrote a paper once on Robert E. Howard for a HS English class; Mrs Kogar gave me a B - grudgingly - as she accused me of making everything up because SHE had never HEARD of the guy. I brought in a stack of paperbacks and she make it a B+.
Mrs. Kogar, a middle-aged wannabe socialite with a heavily affected New England accent (this was Florida, I have no idea where she was from originally just that she didn’t sound like she was from THERE - neither did I, I learned English in Ohio and still have no accent to this day) had us reading twisted crap from Truman Capote and his ilk who she just RAVED about. I could barely stomach it.
But I did read a lot of Tom Wolfe a few years later (Hollyweird made a couple movies from his works, like “The Right Stuff,” Bonfire of the Vanities and I found the novel “Mauve Gloves Madmen Clutter and Vine” to be a real riot. Wolfe’s stuff about New York elitists and business world I found even stranger than the worlds of science fiction. To this day I hate cities with a passion. Cities are for termites, not humans.
Thanks for posting this link.
He was married for a short time, if that’s what you mean.
I know, he was married to a Jewish lady. But from his writing, you would never know he had met a human being before.
He has a tendency to overwrite. Too much prose, too little dialog.
His strength was his originality and "forceful" vision. As if compelled to write what he did.
Some speculate that Lovecraft was gay. In which case, his marriage was a beard.
His wife was older than he, and already had a child from a previous marriage. And the marriage only lasted a few years.
I found his works back in 1961 at the Carlsbad NM Public Library. I enjoyed them! One girl in my high school class laughed at me for reading them. I told her to read the first story in the book (THE RATS IN THE WALLS) and see if she likes them.
The next week she came in and cussed me out for having her read that story.”I could not sleep all week end because every sound I heard sounded like THE RATS IN THE WALLS!”
Now got several collections of his stories.
I love Robert E. Howard. The Valley of the Worm was the first story I read by him. I have recently read two volumes of story collections. However, HP Lovecraft is different. I am currently reading The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and I am struggling through it. Seems like sheer graphomania to me. It’s going on and on and it’s a lot about nothing. Sorry if I offended somebody’s sensitivities. It’s just my personal impression and opinion. And I am surprised because HP Lovecraft is one of the greatest and most famous horror fiction authors.
*** a virulently xenophobic racist...***
Sounds like almost all normal people back in the 1920s. You should read John Russell’s short stories of the South Seas published at that time. The book THE LOST GOD is a good one, but if you are a faint heart better get ready for some racist names about the South Sea Islanders.
He was able to put the voices in his head down on paper.
An old buddy of mine was crazy about Robert E. Howard.
For some odd reason portions of a minor story from a boxing pulp in I think The Book of Robert E. Howard, probably, stays with me and I remember scenes from time to time.
Could write vividly and evocatively.
My first exposure to the genre was Lovecraft.
Amazing writer.
L
True!
I think Lovecraft’s chief claim to fame is Cosmic Horror.
19th century British writers Lord Dunseny and Arthur Machaen (of The Angels of Mons fame) were influences upon him.
Some of his stories have been adapted for film and television with mixed results.
My favorite Lovecraft tale is The Music of Eric Zahn. Which I think could be handled as a small stage play with a four-piece string quartet (or whatever musicians think they can pull it off) for the musical interludes.
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