Talk:H. P. Lovecraft

Title
So short. So concise. --Bob_M (talk) 15:46, 23 June 2007 (CDT)

By the standards of his time he was not that racist, he was against violence towards minorities but believed in segregation in the golden age of the KKK that is remarkably moderate.
 * ''When, long ago, the gods created Earth
 * ''In Iove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
 * ''The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
 * ''Yet were they too remote from humankind.
 * ''To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
 * ''Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
 * ''A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
 * ''Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.
 * H.P. Lovecraft, "On the Creation of Niggers"
 * 17:14, 13 November 2011 (UTC)


 * More than a year late to the party, but just to chime in for the Yuggoth of it, the unsigned comment is true - but that's late in his life. When he was living in New York he was racist to the point of paranoia. If you read Houellebecq's Against the World, Against Life there are some written quotes from Lovecraft about "rat-faced Jews", "hideous negroes" and "Italico-Semitico-mongoloids" and even suggests the use of cyanide gas to "quell the New York mongoloid problem."

As for the segregation, that was just a shift in his weight on "stow 'em out of sight or kill 'em" towards the former. In some letter to a relative he talks about how beaches should be segregated because it would be unthinkable to have civilised people next to "chimpanzees". --Polite Timesplitter talk to me sugar, but best keep it on thedown-low 12:41, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Rollback on atheism category
Any sources to show he was an atheist? According to Houellebecq, he slipped into agnosticism, but I've yet to hear any evidence about him being an atheist. Polite Timesplitter talk to me sugar, but best keep it on thedown-low 22:37, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Check weak atheism. Also, check his essays which are pretty clear in stating his belief that there was no god. — Unsigned, by: ORavenhurst / talk Do You Believe That? 22:58, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I once read a biography of him (don't ask me why) and the author (S.T. Josi) said he was probably agnostic: he simply did not care, but found organized religion to be a joke, and hated Judeo-Christian understandings of God. I've also seen some Lovecraft Scholars imply that he wanted the maltheistism and the cosmic indifference of his stories to be a counter-point to Christian and humanist conceptions of god and the world. So, take that for what you will.--Logic and Empricism (talk) 01:59, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Two diary entries by him concerning immigrants from across the pacific
At the elevated station at 6th Ave. and 42nd St. I lost my fellow Anglo-Saxon, whose home is far to the north in the semi-African jungles of Harlem… ...Kleiner proceeded to lead us into the slums; with "Chinatown" as an ulterior objective. My gawd—what a filthy dump! I thought Providence had slums, and antique Bostonium as well; but damn me if I ever saw anything like the sprawling sty-atmosphere of N.Y.s lower East Side. We walked -- at my suggestion -- in the middle of the street, for contact with the denizens, spilled out of their bulging brick kennels as if by a spawning beyond the capacity of the places, was not by any means to be sought. At times, though, we struck peculiarly deserted areas these swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are--…--a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose, and imagination would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place. The streets, even in the centre, are filthy with old papers and vegetable debris -- probably the street-cleaners dislike to soil their white uniforms by visiting such infernos. >from a letter written May 18, 1922

Your slum travelogue interested me vastly, and I hope you will take me to this hideous cesspool someday soon. Whether I have ever beheld any place of equal putrefaction remains to be seen—at present I find it hard to conceive of anything more utterly and ultimately loathsome than certain streets of the lower east side where Kleiner took Loveman and me in April 1922. The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They -or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed- seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and innundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay…a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point… >from a letter written March 21, 1924

...Make whatever you want out of these, store them till later use.--Teslashark (talk) 12:14, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I seem to recall Lovecraft's racism stemmed from an actual phobia of foreign things rather than the more normal places; the guy had a lot of strange phobias. The spirit of the times just meant he didn't seem particularly odd back then. King Skeleton (talk) 05:56, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Not a word about his atheism and scepticism?
C'mon, there is the whole book of his letters on this subject http://www.amazon.com/Against-Religion-Atheist-Writings-Lovecraft/dp/0578052482 As for scepticism, he and Houdini planned to write together woo-debunking book (The Cancer of Superstition), but it didn't work out because of Houdini's death. The "Cthulhu Myths are real" coockoo crowd also deserves a mention.

Why are you surprised...
That Lovecraft would be a racist and support the New Deal? Many early progressives weaved together what they considered to be rationally minded scientific racism and a left of center economic agenda. The thoroughgoing racist President Wilson (perhaps our most racist president) would be a prime example. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that Lovecraft supported him too. Burkean (talk) 22:41, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
 * This is just a nitpick, but I'd say Wilson was only the second most racist president, the first being Andrew Jackson.

In fairness to Lovecraft he wasn't particularly racist at that point in his life. His support for the New Deal heralded in a change of altitude for Lovecraft and a sense of shame for his nonsense in the past. He denounced the fascists as Nazis as ignorant reactionaries, citing himself as a smugly ignorant reactionary in the past:

"I can the better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was". - H. P. Lovecraft.

I actually think it is a little dad that people forget his interesting "redemption arch". - Anax Andron

Sexism?
While I'm no die-hard Lovecraft fan, I do own an anthology of his work and have read several of his stories. I've seen plenty of evidence of his racism, both in his works and while looking for digital copies of his personal letters on-line, but one thing I haven't seen is any of his supposed "misogyny". Now don't get me wrong, considering Lovecraft's racism, it wouldn't surprise me if he was sexist. The problem is, I can't find a single trace of evidence in his books that would suggest that he was a misogynist. Not one. All I've seen when looking it up is people claiming that he was a raging racist and sexist, almost to the point where you'd think that all of his stories have the protagonist tell women to "know their place" at least once. I've even found some sites that blatantly state that he WASN'T a misogynist, or at least wasn't hateful towards women like he was towards different ethnicities. Here's one place I've found: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/cienciareal_lovecraft01.htm

And no, I'm not a Lovecraft apologist, I'm not doing this to try and claim that he wasn't as bad as some people think. While I won't hold his different values agianst him, or at the least won't let them ruin my enjoyment of his stories, I won't really care if he turns out to be worse that I've read or better than what you've wrote. I just want some clarification.

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
An interesting view into Lovecraft and his life and work. I highly recommend it. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 17:54, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Lovecraft in modern day
Modern day interpretations are mixed. Some people call this guy a Nazi, contrary to evidence, and other people are whitewashing how racist the guy is. 04:05, 9 August 2017 (UTC)