Seven Striking Facts about H.P. Lovecraft
- 1. H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the most influential popular writers in 20thC America, yet published only one short book during his lifetime, instead publishing in amateur magazines and pulp science fiction journals. He would have been forgotten but for friends who founded Arkham House press to publish his fiction.
2. First editions and editions of pulps with his stories in are now worth thousands of dollars—more than Lovecraft ever received during his writing career.
3. Lovecraft's prose is ornate and decadent and not to everyone's taste. In a disdainful early review of the Arkham House collections that buried Lovecraft's reputation for another twenty years, the leading American critic Edmund Wilson declared that “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.â€
4. His most famous story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ has resulted in a whole panoply of nasty monstrous gods in follow-up books, comics, films, cuddly toys and even minor religions. Yet it was initially rejected for publication by Weird Tales, one of many of Lovecraft's failures during his lifetime.
5. It was only in the 1960s that Lovecraft finally reached a large audience, with popular paperback editions and the first B-movie adaptations. As a sign of the times, the band 'H. P. Lovecraft' issued its first album in 1967 and was a key part of the San Francisco psychedelic scene.
6. Lovecraft had a habit of composing poetry and writing letters in a mannered 18th century style. He hated the modern world—and modern literature. He had a particular disgust for the Modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot.
7. Lovecraft led an eccentric life, mostly working at night or wondering around town in the early hours, seeking atmospheres of antiquarian America. In his last years, extremely poor, he lived on mashed potato and ice cream. This, it turned out, soothed the undiagnosed stomach cancer that would kill him only five days after he was admitted to hospital.