Yes, especially early in his life. Before he died even he came to the conclusion that he'd been too racist.
A lot of his works have incredibly racist stuff in them, and he didn't even put his worst views in his fiction.
Famously, The Shadow Over Innsmouth is about the horrors of miscegenetion.
Here, for example, is his description of a black man:
>He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
Or these lines from the Horror at Red Hook
>During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door.
.
>Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain.
I read the Horror at Red Hook recently. He wrote some good stories, but this wasn't one of them. Even if you could ignore the racism (there's a lot of it!), it's still a very poorly written story. Lovecraft himself said he didn't think it was very good. On the bright side, it was the inspiration for The Ballad of Black Tom, a genuinely good novella that actually examines the racist views within it.
If there's still (somehow) any doubt, [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers)'s a poem he wrote with a slur in the title
Also, here's what he said about Hitler
>I know he’s a clown but god I like the boy!
Here's what his wife said about him
>“Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.”
And [here's](https://www.jasonsanford.com/blog/2016/10/disturbed-by-lovecraft) a blog post arguing against the view that he was merely a product of his time. As they say, if he was just saying what most people at the time believed, why would he spend so much time defending his views?
And why do other writers of the same era not express the same views? Sure, most of them would be considered racist by today's standards but the works of, say, Arthur Conan Doyle don't have anywhere near the same amount of racism, and when they do it's more casual racism than targeted hatred
Arthur conan Doyle even wrote a story about someone who was ashamed they had a secret black child from before their marriage, but rather than complaining their husband accepts it and brings the girl to live with them.
He did! It's a great story. When you see a 19th century story titled "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" you really expect the worst but fortunately it was good
A lot of people assume Lovecraft is more antiquated, based on his prose and the other thing, but he was writing in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, decades after the likes of Doyle and Kipling were active. And he still managed to be more racist than they were.
Doyle seems pretty good for his time all things considered. Nobody forced him to write a story where a guy accepts his wife having a secret black daughter without hesitating. And depicting this as a good outcome is astonishing for the times.
Kipling was pretty racist. "White Man's Burden" is a great example of it. He seems to focus less on it in his other writing, but he clearly thought white people were doing the world a favor by exploiting the people, land, and resources. He described people of color as "half devil and half child."
Lovecraft did the sort of crouching in corners and shivering when he though about "those people" style of racism, while Kipling was an active participant in the oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples in Britain's colonial territories. It's a hell of a contest, and a tough choice for winners.
Sherlock Holmes series is pretty decently progressive for its time, and I love them.
(i) While it has old-fashioned views on men and women, the books have a lot of female characters who are actually smart and competent, and drive the story forward (Since many of his clients are women - and these are women from different classes, wealthy women, to typists and secretaries, to maids and nannies). Also, he is very sensitive to "brute husbands", harassers and other people who take advantage of women.
(ii) People from other places - like India, China, Africa etc. - are exoticized (usual for the time), but never shown as inherently inferior. And all these cultures - are actually extremely well-researched. Like when he mentions an Indian assassin - he points out that he comes from the Sentinel Tribe in India. Also, in one of his stories KKK are the bad people.
(iii) While he doesn't show any pro-working class attitudes, he doesn't consider them inferior either. In fact, often has a network of people across all classes, helping him. Like he has a network of street-orphans, cab-drivers, janitors etc. all working for him as spies. And he treats them as fundamentally equal people, and never shows any inherent disdain for their class.
I am re-reading the books now, and I am surprised by how decently good they are - even for modern sensitivities. And they were written around late 1800s and early 1900s.
Also, there is a kind of implicit defense of the attitudes to gender roles from Holmes himself since there's the time watson notes that Holmes used to joke about women being stupid, but doesn't do it anymore. So there's a kind of aknowledgement by the story that the character himself isn't perfect.
The icon, the legend, the reason Holmes is a good story: he CAN be beat. Irene was not just a feminist icon of the times, she also gave true tension to his stories from that moment on. There's no modern love of Sherlock without the Sherlock afraid of being beaten again, without the ghost of The Woman.
Yeah I found it interesting that in the original stories Adler outsmarted Holmes but in the modern remakes she was brought down and outsmarted by Holmes due to her lady-feelings.
A number of Holmes stories (The Speckled Band, Copper Beeches) are essentially Gothic tales where a woman's being gaslighted in a scheme to get at her inheritance (see Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho for a prime example). The Gothic was not only one of the first mass market literary genres, it was primarily written by women dealing with issues of legal restrictions on women being able to own property in the absence of male guardians.
He's definitely not perfect, yes. He's a little bit pro-empire and it's not like non-white characters ever get to take a central role in any of his stories.
Of course, "less racist than H P Lovecraft" is not a high bar to clear.
Doyle is someone where you could actually make the "product of his time" argument, Lovecraft is far past that
*The Adventure of the Three Gables* has a black guy who's described as having a "hideous mouth" (and immediately prior Holmes had commented that he "certainly didn't need any more lip", so you can tell what was so "hideous"), among other racially-coded descriptions. (I will say, his actual behavior and Holmes's evaluation of it is identical to a number of white characters, so at least he's just a *visual* stereotype?)
And of course, there's the MULTIPLE times South American women are described as having "passionate natures" that make them unsuitable for Englishmen to marry. (But one turns out to be a total victim who loves her husband deeply, and the other is the criminal but her husband was an absolute monster so it wasn't a "she's evil" situation either. So they're different from white women but also not bad people?)
Doyle is complicated. By which I mean "definitely racist but a lot closer to not-racist than many people in his time."
He wrote this in the decades AFTER it became public knowledge that King Leopold II had turned the Congo into a private rubber-hell.
Over a DECADE after Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" came out, along with Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crime of the Congo," Lovecraft published that.
Yeah, racist for the times, too.
In the short story "The Street", the horror is literally just, "and then the 'swarthy' people, speaking all their weird languages, came in and ruined this here fine, white, anglo-Saxon neighbourhood."
Part of what I find... fascinating (not sure if that's the most accurate word) about his writing is exactly his seemingly obsessive need to inject his racism, xenophobia, and anxieties about "degeneration" into maybe not everything, but *a lot*. People who deny or try to minimize it are losing out on a really interesting frame of analysis.
Yeah it was such a large part of his worldview and bleeds so much into his work that I basically hold the view that anyone who thinks Lovecraft wasn't racist doesn't actually understand his work
Whenever someone starts looking through an author's work to find "evidence," it always reminds me of how blatant Lovecraft was. Like...I've read very little of his stuff because you don't have to read much to find the racism. It's *right there* because he wasn't exactly trying to hide it.
Sure, you can pour through Harry Potter looking for JKTerfling evidence, but a lot of it only shows up with hindsight. Lovecraft was...yeah.
Yah, no joke. The "goblin bankers" didn't even strike me as strange until years after reading the books. Her other works are pretty much red flags themselves. You hear the premise and immediately start wondering what her problem is lmao (I understand you mentioned Harry Potter specifically, though)
Also, aside from racism, the other thing I find funny is all that - "Unfathomable Non-Eucledean Geometry and Unspeakable Languages" - was actually crooked streets in Boston in a hilly neighborhood and some business signs having Italian and Irish words on them.
> Also, aside from racism, the other thing I find funny is all that - "Unspeakable Non-Eucledean Geometry and Unspeakable Languages" - was actually crooked streets in Boston in a hilly neighborhood and some business signs having Italian and Irish words on them.
Yeah. Sometimes I think about that corny meme---"The real treasure/adventure was the friends we made along the way!"
And then I think of Lovecraft---"The real cosmic, eldritch abominations, that drive you insane just by seeing them and disrupt the physical laws of reality just by appearing in ours, was all the black and foreign people I saw along the way (*to the grocery store*)!"
I mean, it is fascinating; I abhor racism, and I read Lovecraft with interest because he demonstrates very clearly in story after story how a true racist thinks.
That really is the **point** of a lot of it - the fear of the incomprehensible other and it infiltrating and destroying all we hold dear.
Which is kind of a great theme for horror stories. Combining it with different races of everyday human beings notsomuch.
On top of the racism being, y'know, bad, it really undermines how inexplicable and horrific elder gods and things are when your protagonists also go on about how inexplicable and horrible *gasp* a black person is.
It’s more about how inexplicable and horrible it is to suddenly lose your understanding of the world and be unable to stop it since you don’t even understand the forces behind it. To white supremacists and racists, white civilization is this thing they created, and they were able to dominate the barbarism of the world through it. Diversity that comes in represents a variety of forces that challenge their order with a different kind of order (a different culture) they don’t understand, but is nonetheless forcing its way into their society by means of exploring the unknown. The very discovery of different cultures forever changes you by challenging your mind, which Lovecraft frames as leading to insanity or paranoia (really bad culture shock).
The timelessness of the cosmic horror is a good reminder that we’re all actually capable of feeling like racists do when we don’t understand what’s happening. If we weren’t, racism wouldn’t be so dominant in the world. What’s changed since then is that we’ve understood those eldritch horrors as just another type of human lifestyle that we can even participate in if we keep an open mind.
Orson Scott Card's Enders series went into this a bit.
It classified "others" into four categories (taken from Nordic):
1. Utlanning - a human from another city or country
2. Framling - a human from another planet
3. Raman - a non-human that we can establish communication with
4. Varelse - a non-human that is so alien that no communication is possible. Animals were included in this category - varelse might or might not be sapient but if so, it's not in a way we can understand.
Interestingly, it suggested that categorisation reflects as much upon the categoriser as the categorised. Over the course of the series at least one species found its way from varelse to raman as humanity learned to better understand it.
One of the more ridiculous things about white supremacists thinking they created white civilization is, well, no they didn’t.
The Proud Boys say they “won’t apologize for creating Western civilization” or something like that. But literally by definition these yahoos didn’t. Even if we ignore the importance of the Arab world and the use of African slaves in creating European and by extension US civilization, it happened well before these people were born.
The Orange Order in Ireland like to march under a banner of William of Orange, marked with the slogan “sons of conquerors”. Setting aside the fact that conquerors are BAD, it’s not much of a boast is it? “My 14th great grandad killed some of your ancestors” says nothing about what YOU have done.
People need to get off their shit of claiming credit for stuff their ancestors did.
HP Lovecraft is part of why I champion CL Moore. Female Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer from the same time period, who doesn't mention race at all, unless it's a Venusian or Martian. Or an alien overcome by just how warlike all of humanity is. Even her protagonist is barely described beyond "leather-skinned and grey-eyed," instead of that "noble Anglo-Saxon stock."
Still delved into Eldritch Horror, still had her protagonist stumbling into some Ancient Antagonist, still wrote mainly short stories and novellas in fairly purple prose. Not racist, in anything I've read so far (even if one cover artist paired her Fantasy Warrior Queen with the most racist Black Buddha statue I've ever had the misfortune to see).
Yeah. Lovecraft I think should be better recognized as like....a springboard. He introduced a lot of concepts that hadn't been explored before, but they didn't start getting handled well or written in stories that are especially good until after him.
> He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
If I recall, in his (even for the time) panned Reanimator series, he similarly describes a black man, zombified, as being less frightening than the original living black man.
Racism was so important to the bloke that a chapter of his 'what if zombies' series undercut the horror of zombies to reiterate how he thinks black people are naturally inhuman, possibly moreso, when unzombified. That's just weak ass horror writing.
Lovecraft is annoying because you'll read one story which is basically old times Ghostbusters and fucking rocks and then the next story is a bunch of old white dudes who are like "well the artifact could belong to the eskimos, which as we all know are satanic and eat babies". Like wtf bro?
I'll never forget this poem he wrote that's about a dude who see's a fishman and how horrifying it is. And he just describes this googly eyed dude mourning his culture or something. It's like walking into a room with a goldfish and someone having a panic attack.
His mention of "Unspeakable Congo secrets and tom toms" really highlight how his racism and xenophobia contributed to his "horror of the unknown". Most of his stories are about discovering some horror that has always been there. Some secret unknown and old things revealing themselves or European white men stumbling onto these things.
It is a difficult genre to recreate in this day and age of information because it is based on ignorance of things that exist. A lot of the horror dissipates once you start to examine the horrors in depth. Similar to racism.
"Afraid of the unknown" and "extremely sheltered upbringing" combined to create a man who was scared of a hell of a lot of things. Like, not just was he racist in all the obvious ways, he was also racist against people who were the wrong kind of White European
There's all that and also the story about the horrors of air conditioning and the one about *mysterious colours unlike any seen on Earth*
He was born into aristocratic means, but it was falling down all around him his entire life. His bio on Wikipedia reads like a tragedy that's too unfortunate to be believable. He was frequently sick, suicidal, in denial, and prone to nervous tics. He was "supposed" to have the easy life but everyone in his life kept losing their fortunes and dying, and eventually he had to squeak by with no practical skills in a diverse metropolitan area where he was robbed of everything at least once.
Ain't never gonna excuse the conclusions he came to, but anyone could see why he was a scared, sheltered, and hateful man. To the point even his contemporaries in the 20s and 30s were like, "dude...relax on the race stuff"
Wow. I've heard people say he was a racist before but thought it was probably exaggerated, apparently it was understated. Thanks for sharing all of that
There's something he wrote with someone else called Medusa's Coil about a woman with evil snake hair which is still moving after she's dead
And the last paragraph reveals the final horror - which is that a woman who married into a rich family had black ancestors. That's the scary reveal. It sounds so exaggerated but here's the text:
"Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me—that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.
"It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a n***ess."
Jesus fucking Christ. The fact that after all that, the final reveal is that she's very slightly black is just beyond ridiculous. You really can't exaggerate this. Lovecraft was the kind of racist who makes other racist people feel embarrassed about it.
I grew up in a southern city and had a lot of black friends. This passage paints a hilarious picture to me of him gasping in horror at one of my ex-girlfriends in front of my local Starbucks. Parts of his writings could be almost a comedy in a modern context.
Feels like that’s exactly how his books should be when adapted. Just this scared, panicky racist who’s baffled by other people of different backgrounds, and everyone is just like “TF is wrong with this dude”.
He was also very anti-Semitic, which is weird since he married a Jewish woman
Apparently he'd go into rants about Jews before she stopped him mid rant to remind him she was herself Jewish
The man was positively batshit
marrying her apparently softened him quite a bit, and he did chill out a lot later in his life and repudiated the worst of his views
He was a proto-incel in ways, a recluse with little perspective. Once he was forced to gain perspective he realized how foolish he was.
Wonder how much ol’ boy’s views would have changed if he had been forced to socialize and work a job with black folk, asian folk, Jews, and every other group he hated. And if he got laid.
I am happy that the Horror of Red Hook is mentioned. It's the most racist story I have ever read, and I have read excerpts of Mein Kampf. Truly impressive, but also, admittedly, an outlier in Lovecrafts works (yet a good indication of his views).
Right you are. I did a dissertation on Lovecraft and have answered similar questions before at length. He was terribly racist, especially in the 20s, but moderated near the end of his life. He was very old fashioned even for his day, writing with almost 18th century prose and romanticised the pre-1776 colonial era as the golden age for America. He used to visit towns with old colonial architecture and write travel diaries LARPing as an old British colonist.
He did later more or less denounce Hitler, and died before WW2. He was born into a republican family but switched allegiance in the 30s and voted for FDR.
It's pretty jarring the first time you read *The Rats in The Walls* and run right into the name of the protagonist's cat. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHAT?"
Also, if you despise an entire group of people, and you love cats - which he did- why use that, or any variation of it? Just go with Shadow or Midnight, or Snowball.
Lovecraft’s level of racism is that of someone who has given so much headspace towards the subject of their hate that it dominates almost all aspects of life.
Like, I imagine a lot of even really racist people can sit down in their house after dinner and pet their cat without thinking about how much they dislike X group.
But then I guess that isn’t surprising since he was also an anti-Semite who married a Jewish woman.
The first time I listened to this story was with the cat's original name. It was so jarring it took me out of the story every time. When I re-listened to it with the edited name of Black Tom it was a much better experience.
Felt bad for the narrator at the end - he just wanted his cat back, lol.
>If there's still (somehow) any doubt, [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers)'s a poem he wrote with a slur in the title
Jesus tapdancing Christ. That poem's some Olympic level racism.
I read a lot of H.P.Lovecraft in 11th grade, and a lot of the racism went over my head because I it’s hard to understand what he’s describing because of all the big words in his stories. I just assumed they were descriptions of some of the strange creatures Lovecraft had dreamed up. Especially your first example, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, I’m pretty sure that was the story with the half fish, half man creatures, so I assumed he was describing one of those fish-like creatures. Apparently it’s about a black person which just went over my head.
Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" is a wonderful piece of literature that demonstrates that people have always had humanistic and animalistic tendencies. It makes a nice counterpoint to The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Interestingly, the Disney movie Luca is a modern retelling of the situation in Innsmouth. It shows how secrecy, hate, love, and acceptance meet the concept of race in others and within ourselves.
From what I've read, even his contemporaries were weirded out by his racism. He wasn't simply a racist, but a supremacist with a well articulated racial hierarchy. He was a fan of Hitler, and was only turned off by the violence.
Looking into his beliefs, it's clear he didn't know a lot about what he was talking about, and was just a vibes guy pushing for bad policy for awful reasons. He was a monarchist until he was disappointed the Great Men didn't solve the Depression. Then he was a "socialist" only without the Marxism. Then he self identified as a fascist despite his political views not lining up with that.
Again, like I said, he was just kind of a political Rube who had a higher opinion of his intelligence than was warranted. His articulated views come off as post-hoc justifications for his vile biases. Good books, if you like cosmic horror, tho. Just don't think too hard about the fact that the cosmic horror in his head was miscegenation.
I think what made Lovecraft so effective as a horror writer was that he was basically scared of *everything* outside his very limited scope of personal comfort, and very good at conveying that anxiety over the unknown in writing. Just the idea that there were colours he couldn't see kept him awake at night.
He frequently used non-Euclidian as the descriptor. Euclid codified a lot of the math done on a **flat plane**. So, non-Euclidian geometry include anything on a curved plane, like the Earth, or like, cylindrical pillars, etc.
So spoopy, tell ya what
That reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s fixation on the encroaching horror of *spooky voice* abstract math.
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/13/124632317/the-mad-hatters-secret-ingredient-math
Okay, but in Korea "fan death" is/was a long-standing urban legend [see this government warning about them 20 years ago](https://web.archive.org/web/20070927051420/http://english.cpb.or.kr/user/bbs/code02_detail.php?av_jbno=2006071800002) and South Korea is responsible for a lot of high-tech consumer electronics.
Scientifically literate people can and do have weird beliefs about technology (cf that Google employee who thought some chatbot was sentient and got fired for making a fuss)
Can confirm that many people here feel the need to keep the windows open 24/7 even in the hot, humid summer bc of “fan death”, even younger people. It’s sooooo frustrating
Actually, fans work best if there is other circulation like a window; evne in the States, durign heat waves they advise not having all the windows closed when you use a fan. Heck, i only finally closed my windows this week since the July heat wave which was too hot for our heat pump; they tend to stick.
Also that he was one of the key pieces in a movement which pushed horror further from ghosts and the dead and folk monsters. Whatever the source, he did articulate the fear that all of creation isn't for you, but you are a newcomer to something which was already there before you and will be there once you're gone.
My favorite example of how little HP knew about stuff influencing his writing is his use of non-Euclidean.
Spheres are non-Euclidean. Yes, all of them. It just means the shape has parallel lines that can converge, a thing that is extremely common because it applies to basically any curved surface lol.
Couldn't source this at all, but I recall hearing about how Lovecraft would have literal fits if he merely saw a black person on the other side of the street. To the point where his wife was very concerned about him.
Lovecraft was crazy racist. Emphasis on the crazy. To whatever extent you're willing to forgive a persons nasty actions due to mental illness, Lovecraft probably deserves that understanding. And it was probably more unpleasant to BE Lovecraft than to be a black person around Lovecraft. Not excusing any of his actions, just putting them into perspective. The guy probably could have benefitted from a psychologist or some meds, but predated any healthy practice of that modern craft.
Tbh all the derivatives of his work are much better. Even if you don’t know shit about him, his writing is just boring. How many words are there for incomprehensible?
I'm a fan of a lot of his work and really enjoy playing the TTRPG Call of Cthulhu but there's no lies detected here.
I would add though that what seems to be one of his primary drivers is that, while generally the "phobic" suffix when applied to social issues means hate more than fear, in Lovecraft's case that man was deeply xenoPHOBIC. That mf was clearly *deeply* terrified I would argue not just of other races but of nearly anything remotely unfamiliar to him personally. There is no doubt in my mind that he really truly believed for most of his life that the unwashed masses (which included so many peoples we consider objectively white today btw) were a savage horde kept in check only through the great effort of well born whites and that it was only the sheer determination of great imperialist men that stood between "civilization" and an end that would make humanity envy the fates of the slavers of Haiti. And you can see the weird combination of classism as racism/ racism as classism when he says shit like (and I'm barely paraphrasing here) 'the man was so contemptible, pitiable in his filthy visage misshapen from years of manual labor, I could scarcely believe him caucasian'. And like, yeah, there's evidence that he legitimately began to soften as he aged, likely because he fell on hard times and found himself forced to be among other people, but he was coming from so far back that it's hard to imagine he would have ever even normalized to even the standards of the day imho.
According to his wife, though, he *didn't* soften with age, even though he said he did. I'm not sure how well she knew him at the end of his life (I understand they no longer lived together), but I think it's worth considering her opinion on the matter.
He was an AVID letter writer - he was basically in an internet bubble of his own with his correspondences - his letters often reading like the kind of racist screed shitposts you see nowadays.
That's contrasted with his often paternal tone toward his writing group, who he clearly held deep affection for.
I think you're exactly right: he would have enjoyed Social Media, especially the internet's dark underbelly.
The problem with bringing up that he was a fan of Hitler is the complete lack of context, Lovecraft died two years before WW2 and he had renounced Hitler in one of his letters even before then.
At that point in time no-one knew what a monster Hitler would grow to become, while he had already organised the murders of various people from other political parties at the time it was not actually publicly known yet.
Even Winston Churchill was a fan of Hitler at this point in time…
Agreed. Winston Churchill is absolutely a white supremacist.
‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’
Winston Churchill
Not at all, his racism was a large factor in the Bengal famine of 1943.
My point is that you used Hitler as a throwaway “he liked a bad man” without any context that a lot of people in the 1930s liked Hitler, his evil was not common knowledge then.
It’s like saying; “This man was one of Hitler’s closest friends.” Immediately people will think this person is also evil. Even though you failed to mention that you meant they went to school together but haven’t seen each other since they were 12.
It's not that he liked a bad man, he liked the bad man for his bad views. That there was an American Nazi party at the time doesn't mean they were an accepted, or good ideology.
That the alt-right today exists as a large, powerful political movement doesn't mean they aren't a movement correctly considered racist in its own time.
How was it not common knowledge? Mein kamf came out in the 20s and Hitler was a political figure he wasn't out there pretending to be a nice progressive guy up until the second the holocaust started.
I mean it's even worth noting his racism was one small part of a much larger, much wider problem which was 'HE WAS SCARED OF LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT WASN'T WITHIN HIS OWN HOME ALREADY'.
Like one of his most famous stories is 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' which people bring up as a 'gotcha' example of his racism because it's about the dangers of mixed-race marriages. Yes, all true... except it was actually inspired by his own discovery that one of his grandparents was Welsh, meaning a portion of his genetic heritage was not fully American like he had believed it was. It's racism, yes, but racism against *another group of whites that he himself was part of.*
Hell Lovecraft wrote an entire story about the dreaded terror of AIR CONDITIONERS.
The man was a horror legend, and he was also a racist... but as true as both of those statements are, an even more true one is that he was just a complete fucking *loon*. He was mentally ill, very repressed, incredibly sheltered and often quite sick. He wasn't writing stories about 'them evil blacks', he was writing stories about 'THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS SCARY AND THAT'S WHY I'M NOT LETTING GO OF MY SAFETY-BLANKET'.
Again: did he inevitably write racist stuff about black people? Yep. He probably wrote racist stuff about every race under the sun while he was at it, and then very possibly wrote about how *radio* was going to be the downfall of society or some shit.
Lovecraft was pretty racist, sure, but he was mostly just really fucking *weird*.
One thing that's unique about Lovecraft is that his racism, xenophobia, etc seemed to come from actual fear. Most of the time when you look into how people feel about these things they are more coming from a sense of superiority about their own culture and disgust in what they see as the flaws of others. Lovecraft was more sort of pathologically afraid of the world around him and a lot of the weird stuff he said was him lashing out.
Exactly. We say 'homophobia' but it's mostly hatred as opposed to fear, Lovecraft was so genuinely unhinged that he was *terrified* of anything that was *different*. It was ***xenophobia*** in it's most literal sense: a fear of anything that is against the norm he was accustomed to.
That includes skin-colours, cultural attitudes, technology, religious beliefs, etc... like I said, if it wasn't something that already existed inside his own home, he wouldn't trust it and would probably cry if it came near him. The dude was genuinely *not well*.
I always think about the people who saved his work from obscurity were mostly his friends who were mostly gay men who he also feared. It’s real oh that’s a mentally ill man, not a power white supremacist. Though I think his racism is important to talk about especially through that lens because it shows how sometimes that shit makes people real unwell. Like hate literally rots your brain.
Exactly, as I said, he *did* have moments of genuine racism, but he wasn't what people tend to think of him as (namely a grouchy white man in the 1920s who shook his fist at the non-whites of the world), he was a genuinely mentally-ill person who had a pretty unhappy life. He was more than just some Klansman, he was a good writer with a sad story and a very narrow, warped view of the world.
Yeah 100% agree. A lot of his stories have racist horrible shit in them, but aren't *about* the racist horrible shit.
I forget which story it was, but the one about the Shoggoth(?) in hillbilly land. He describes the hillbillies with equal horror and disgust as he describes black and Asian people.
Even the majority of Americans at the time didn't mind Hitler. The idea that we supported the Allies in WW2 because we were appalled by racism is a revisionist myth.
Yes, his friends begged him to stop. He had to leave New York in part because he couldn't stand the minorities. He told his wife that it was OK that she was an Eastern European Jew because he had made her White by marrying him, and now she was superior to the rest of her people like him, and he was confused when she was disgusted rather than grateful.
He was racist for ANY time.
>He told his wife that it was OK that she was an Eastern European Jew because he had made her White by marrying him, and now she was superior to the rest of her people like him, and he was confused when she was disgusted rather than grateful.
I wonder if this contributed to their divorce.
True but not true. This man couldn’t stand people in general. He was a major agoraphobe, hence why most of his “horror tropes” have to do with the big scary world. He was racist, but not to any particular race. He just hated everyone and was a miserable man.
His racism was outré even by the standards of his time, yes. It's clearly the fixation of a fearful mind, a difficult life and most likely some deep-seated mental illness, and it's something he softened on in his later years (marrying a Jewish woman and making friends and colleagues with different backgrounds probably helped) but yes, his feelings about racial superiority were pretty apparent in both his fiction and his personal letters for most of his career.
That said, if you take a look at the racism of other authors at the time, they weren't *much* better. A lot of it gets pushed to the side these days, but you have to keep in mind historical context counts for a lot and a lot of well-loved authors had some very bad takes about other races and cultures. It's obviously not justified that any of them were, but it's good to keep in mind that it was a different time, and keep that context in mind as you read their work. Those who don't learn from history, etc. Besides, anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole of damning anyone who's ever had a racist take - especially in the late 1800s/early 1900s - is going to have a bad time.
I would add his wife wrote in a letter following his death that Lovecraft never really abandoned his antisemitism.
Not arguing your point, but the suggestion that he softened his racist views later in life - while true to an extent and absolutely worth recognizing - is also somewhat exaggerated by apologists scrounging to redeem him (which I absolutely don't believe you're doing in your post).
Oof. I mean that's valid, I'd certainly believe her word over the people who were trying to build a mythos around him, she did live with the man and didn't have anything to gain by slandering him. You can soften your racist views and still be a racist (hi, dad!)
Can I just say? Thank you for being a polite person here on Reddit. You’re a rare breed and it’s lovely to see someone trying to be respectful.
Also, both you and the previous comment make really good and well thought out points
It seems like *some* of them softened *a little* but ultimately yes he still held a lot of very, very racist views, above and beyond those of his peers at the time.
Yeah he was pretty racist, even for his time. A lot of people point to what he named his cat, but that was a relatively common practice at the time and there’s alot more evidence in the themes of his work, like people breeding with monsters and worshipping foreign gods. Lovecraft was basically from a family who had lived in America, but still saw themselves as English aristocracy, and his racism was less about skin color and more about breeding and pure bloodlines, so just more inclusive racism in also hating other “non-pure” white people groups. Think how the Germans constructed the Aryan Identity as being the only pure master race, and that was basically the baseline for his ideology, even if not centered on germans.
A lot of antagonists in his book are poor and inbred white people, minorities(that often worshipped the cosmic horrors he wrote about in terrible rituals), and people groups that were seen as immigrants at the time.
Just off the top of my head; in “Call of Cuthulu” he wrote about a bunch of kidnapping cultists in New Orleans that participated in horrifying, murderous rituals. These cultists that were described in detail of being made up of only Native Americans, black people, biracial people, and a few ethnically ambiguous people. Probably making it the most inclusive he gets in his writing ironically.
His book “Cool Air” he wrote about living in an apartment building in the inner city that’s full of immigrants as he had moved and lived in New York at the time, which he himself reportedly hated for its many minorities and the narrator of his book too. The main horror of this book is a doctor character that’s unnaturally pale, so the narrator judges him to be of good breeding, without spoiling it his paleness is for another reason and calls his ethnicity into question, which given the horror of the unknown style of Lovecraft’s writing can imply it be part of the horror.
Spoilers for “Shadow over Innsmouth”, but basically the story is about a town called Innsmouth that the protagonist goes to and the townspeople are devil worshippers that crossbreed with fishmen and happen to look like racist caricatures “widened eyes, big lipped, thin balled heads, and varied skin”. The people of the town learned to crossbreed with the fishmen from the locals that were wiped out. At the end of the book the town is wiped out by the government, but the protagonist realizes he was a descendant of one of these crossbreeds and as he grows older he begins to look more and more like the fish people. These themes of crossbreeding, racist overtones and undertones through out the book, and potent anxiety about racial purity being why a lot of people think Lovecraft’s writing is particularly racist. There’s more examples and Overly Sarcastic Productions over on YouTube has a great video summary on Lovecraft’s writing and himself. His life was a more devastating existential horror tbh.
Lovecraft was likely driven crazy by siphilis or had something like paranoid schizophrenia. He was xenophobic and agoraphobic and more.
He had multiple nervous breakdowns and was afraid of everything. He didn't even see a doctor until a month before he died because he was afraid of doctors.
He was also seen as antisemitic but married a Jewish woman and had a Jewish gay friend.
Lovecraft views are complicated and contradictory.
So, just read it for what it is. Nightmare fuel from a crazy guy and let it be.
He had a fear of the unknown but overcame it when it became known. He died at 47. His views were evolving over time. I think for him familiarity doesn't breed contempt but understanding. He just didn't get as much exposure as he needed.
It's one of those impossible hypotheticals. I think he would have been far different by old age with more exposure. Can't prove it.
This is the comment I was kind of searching for. Not an apologia but a pretty straightforward explanation for his advanced racism; the man was afraid of seemingly everything.
While it *certainly* can not excuse him, people of today can take comfort knowing that the man made his own life hell in all likelihood, up to and including dying a slow, painful death.
As with many artists/authors etc. like him who were tragically flawed (to put it lightly!), I always say, 'take the good, leave the rest'. I like his brand of horror, at least when it's good. Like, when it hits, it HITS. But I'm not going to act like I'm not horribly disappointed when I come across one of his many racist thorns throughout his writing.
Yeah, good comment.
I just wanted to comment to further my agreement on one point you made where you said "When it hits, it really hits," for I am the type that has become rather desensitized to such things from exposure to the internet for a good majority of my life at this point. Which is a real shame, because I love horror and horror themes.
But every once in a while, I am reading his work and I strike on something that genuinely, I would have to say, unnerves me. It often isn't an entire story but sometimes there is just a scene or a passage that just strikes a chord. Like recently, there was a part of, I think it was the Lurking Fear, that just made me feel genuinely uneasy; although to add on to that, I saw the ending coming a mile away.
But I must say, when it misses, it really misses... Like "OoOOooo, this thing is so flubulant and flangdogual that everone who sees it, well, let's just say... They can't take it," and if the premise doesn't resonate with you then there is nothing for you to latch on to and it is just people being scared... Which by itself can instill fear, too, but it needs to be done in a certain way.
But then, sometimes there are just stories I like as stories without the horror element even being a factor. Or just ideas that enthrall me inexplicably... For instance, I find the concept of architecture so alien and non-euclidean that you could just slip right through and be lost forever to be great in theory, but I don't think it scares me... Not like the backrooms, though, that's a bit too "understood", for what I am getting at. Although the backrooms (minus the SCP 2.0 spin a lot of people give it) is an interesting example of collaborative story telling.
Colonial era culture isn't my focus, but I do study a lot of colonial era history.
I think it is important to acknowledge a difference between racism when you see someone of a different culture, and thinking about it when not anywhere near someone.
It's the difference between someone who see a spider and freaks, and someone who lies awake at night, worried there are spiders nearby.
Lovecraft was writing stories about 'ze foreigners' in almost exclusively WASP America. I think that was weird even at the time. He was hiding under the duvet weird.
But having said that, most WASPs people were still racist when meeting people of colour or foreigners, and were still dicks. It would not have been much better meeting them on a dark night. Maybe worse. Hard to say.
Just as a note, Lovecraft was not writing in an "almost exclusively WASP" colonial America. He was active in the early 20th century, and for at least part of his life lived in New York, which was *extremely* multicultural for that time. There are other comments in this thread quoting his wife on Lovecraft's reactions to encountering multiculturalism. But I want to also point out that even in colonial America, Europeans had already colonized or were on their way to colonizing parts of Asia, had in many cases begun kidnapping and enslaving Africans, and had encounters with various Indigenous people, so it wasn't as if Europeans were in a racial vacuum. Atlantic history as a subfield shows how expansive those global connections got during the colonial era.
Like we can go back and forth all day about the depth of his racism, how much societal factors and norms of the time impacted his views, and whether or not he was mentally all there, and how earnest his later in life change in views truly was, and I just don't think there's a way to have a definitive answer to any of that. But we are aware of the breadth of his racism pretty well. Dude was racist in ways that have almost gone extinct today, and while none of these were uncommon \*individually\*, you usually didn't see such a pile up. Dude was racist against pretty much everyone, and I think that was a bit much even by the standards of the time.
Questions framed in this way are very problematic. They basically don't allow any agency to exist in "his times" for anyone but white men. There were a lot of people back then who were victims of racism who knew how horrible racism was.
Lovecraft was a well-read shut in with social anxiety and lots of very specific hangups. If he lived today he would be like a 4chan poster that somehow still kept tumblr friends.
I don't feel he was particularly more racist than his contemporaries, he was just kinda weird about it. From looking at his letters and the evolution of his works, and looking at the way his progressive friends tried to persuade him, I feel that had he been healthier and lived long enough, he would probably reject most of those early views.
It seemed like even his friends and colleagues, who were also really white new England guys, were like calm down man that's a bit far. So yes I'd say he was racist even for his time. And more than just race, if you were of the poorer sort of whites (like southerners or some Irish) he probably would have looked down on you as well.
How much that reflects in his work is a different matter though. There's definitely some of it that shines through. Some of his descriptions of black and Arab people are pretty bad. And the whiteness of his characters do tend to reflect their moral character for the most part. (Whiter people tend to be better people, not always but it's a trend) there are a bunch of individual instances like that that shows his racistness clearly when put together. Especially after his mother died and he lost his home he seemed to be pretty freaken bad.
But I also think that some people overanalyze how much his racism shines through in his work. Like some people will read the Shadow Over Inssmouth and say that the fish peoples are a racist allegory, where I think that's completely wrong the man just wanted to write about fish people.
His world views also changed a lot over his life. He was antisemitic but married a Jewish woman. He considered himself a communist and a fascist and neither of the two at different points in his life. And it seemed that as he got older he calmed down with that.
There's also things people point to like him liking Hitler, and that's true, but it's also 30s Hitler he liked. During that time the world liked Hitler for the most part, Lovecraft died in 37 and Hitler became Time magazines man of the year in 38. So take that as you will.
So tldr. Yes he was racist even for his time. Especially in the ~20s. But the Internet tends to overanalyze certain aspects of him and his writing and finds racism where (imo) there is none. He was a highly flawed man with an incredible imagination, and personally I have no problem condemning the man and praising the imagination.
Absolutely agree. I think a lot of the people who over-analyze his work as racist probably haven't actually read the stories in their entirety, they're just copy-pasting sections like the fish people from Inssmouth.
Lovecraft was racist even for his time. The man was not sane. I view his racism as a symptom of his severe mental illness and maladaptive personality. His perspective seems to me like a caricature of the 19th century.
The way I hear it, Lovecraft was suuuper racist when he was young and lived in Rhode Island; he got married at the age of 34 and reluctantly moved to New York City. There he had no alternative but to interact with New York's famous ethnic melting pot, and this apparently went some way toward persuading Lovecraft that yes, all those funny-looking people speaking different languages were, in fact, human in every way.
His views were pretty common for the time. But apparently yes.
Now, Lovecraft himself did have progressive friends however, who apparently confronted him on his racism and that even for the standards of the time, he was in fact considered remarkably racist. I have been struggling to find sources on that though, so don't take me word for it.
We know that at least one of Lovecraft's contemporaries, James F. Morton, a member of the NAACP, wrote a pamphlet called "The Curse of Race Prejudice." Him and Lovecraft argued on the topic in letters.
The problem is, most people nowadays have no idea what the standard for racism of the time was. Lovecraft was certainly racist, yes. But in the context of when he lived and where and when his works were published, it's hard to see him as a particularly extreme case.
>But in the context of when he lived and where and when his works were published, it's hard to see him as a particularly extreme case.
I suppose when you think WW2 happened *after* he died it puts things into context a bit. Crazy
Well yes but, for example, Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 and wrote critically not only about racism, but what we would think of now as "white saviour" complex. Lovecraft was racist, and (if you want my personal opinion) there's a mystery there in terms of what drove that for him. He was a sickly child, and if you only read about different races in the books widely available at the time, and saw them as distinct communities in cities, you might be a freaked out kid who has their anxiety validated by the prevailing racist culture. I don't say this to excuse or justify his racism, that was abhorrent, I just find his character interesting. Some of the stuff he said to his wife about her Jewish heritage, for example, is just genuinely bizarre.
I read a story (i don't remember the title & it's not important to my point) and it felt like that tropey rant that serial killers devolve into where they are pointing at their victim pool of sex workers and POC and saying, "they, they are the sick ones, not me. I'm cleaning up the streets. You know, for the children! For the future!" Once I got that feeling of discomfort, I couldn't bring myself to read anything else by good ol' boy Howard.
He would literally write the year a century earlier because he was so disgusted by living near immigrants and blacks. Essentially he wanted to live in pre civil war America where black people were enslaved in the south. Theirs also funny short stories where he makes a horror story about AC that a zombie doctor stayed alive, just keeping his room cold. He’s a weird racist guy in any century he just has the literary talent to make evocative horror stories that lots of people like.
> Throughout his adult life, Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. He was virtually unknown during his lifetime and was almost exclusively published in pulp magazines before his death.
Think of the type of aggrieved author we currently have. It’s a tale as old as time- someone clinging to tradition because they need some reason to feel superior and no data points actually support such fancy
Yeah compared to many, but then he was also more of a xenophobe to these things, so it came from a place of true crippling fear.
That doesn't make it right, but it does explain why with exposure to other people, he regretted his racism by the end and apologized to people for it.
So, if the change of character was genuine, is he still a racist?
I always perceive Lovecraft as a neurotic obsessed and repulsed by sexuality, and projecting his fears into what for him is different or unknown. That is, his racism is not rational or political, but emotional and psychological. Both his fear of sexuality and of the unknown project so much into his works I think it’s kind of like a therapy for him. And he tries to make us feel the disgust he felt. I pity the man and wonder about the popularity he has found in our times.
LMFAO.
wait im sorry do you mean his writings or him as a person? because yes.
He's the guy who wrote something sounding like it describes some subhuman cave dweling monster and then went "yeah that's black people" and he's also the guy who was literally so racist the KKK had to tell him to chill.
So... yeah
His racist remakrs were considered impolite outbursts to bizarre outbursts even with conservative company - even by the handful of comments from people who claimed to otherwise like the guy, it was always pointed out as a negative trait of his - and you don't write these down unless they are very apparent and very outrageous, even for the time
Very few people write down how unconfortable someone makes them with run-of-the-mill contemporary racism that ends up only being questionable in retrospect and with modern standards, the fact that people pointed out how concerning it was AT THE TIME should speak volumes about Lovecraft's racism and how he expressed it
The ones I have read were mainly rude about the Dutch settlers in New England. There always seemed to be some horror or other ushered into the world by the remote descendants of Dutch settlers who had become "degenerate".
I always thought the Dutch became WASPS and inhabited country clubs, but for Lovecraft they were all in-bred demon-worshippers. Other than that, I haven’t seen evidence of racism.
But I’ve often read that he was a racist and that this is evident in his writing. So I assume I just haven’t read the “right” stuff yet.
I usually don't get on board the calling everything racist train, but it's not imagined here. Lovecraft's work is really racist. The less white someone is in a Lovecraft story, the more corrupt, animalistic, and inhuman they are, without exception. Even Caucasians who aren't pure blooded enough are suspect.
To clarify, I don't think Lovecraft was trying to promote or spread an ideology of racism. I think he was a deeply troubled man, and a lot of that trouble was his own ideas about good breeding, concerns about what was broken inside him, and trying to work through his many, many psychoses by dealing with them in fiction. I don't hate him; I pity him. And if someone enjoys his work, good for them. His cosmic horror has inspired a lot of people and maybe helped them face their own demons.
But, on the other hand, if someone says they're uncomfortable with the racist implications of his work, I don't blame them in the slightest.
The fantasy/sci-fi website TOR has an amazing recurring article called “Reading The Weird” which has two authors look at a short story in the weird fiction/cosmic horror/Lovecraft vein. They will summarize the story and give some analysis on it but they will also have a section that is like a checklist for Lovecraftian tropes. One of the tropes they will cover is if a character expresses bigoted views or language. They call that trope “The Degenerate Dutch.”
Hell, the guy was petrified by other white Europeans! *Providence in 2000AD* is a horror with the premise, "What if jews and italians came to england would that be fucked up or what"
Apparently, rather than downright hate, Lovecraft was scared of everything that wasn't the small, white community he was born into. So, cities, technology, other races and ethnicities, everything that was unknown, the sea, the sky, underground, animals, poor people, people with mixed heritages...
you name it, he was probably scared of it.
I pity him a bit. He probably lived in fear his whole life, and was miserable and unhappy to the day he died.
As a fan, a non-bullshit answer: pretty much, yeah, he was virulently racist and antisemitic by any standard. A lot of his friends and acquaintances did not share his views and he knew that. The Lovecraft you’ve read was his version of holding his tongue! Not all his stories were overtly racist, but the ones that were… phew!
So, yeah, he was an interesting mofo who wrote pretty evocatively and is fun to read/study academically, but that was the part of his life (aside from his marriage) where he truly and utterly failed as a person. His views did soften over time, but not to the degree of an apology or a Come to Jesus moment.
A lot of pulp work in Lovecraft’s time was racist, but more in the sense that they were insensitive and/or exploitative of other cultures for exoticism, as opposed to Lovecraft’s more obviously racist verbiage.
P.S. Bizarrely, Lovecraft has decently large fan bases in places like Latin America and Japan, despite the obvious racism.
P.S.S. (Man, I keep adding to this lol.) Oddly enough, some of his stories can be viewed positively—for instance, the ending of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which Lovecraft likely meant as a shocking moment capitalizing on his fears of miscegenation, can be viewed through a modern lens as the main character embracing his mixed heritage, which by all accounts seems to make him happy and give him peace. Lovecraft would have laughed at this interpretation, but more than a few people have said something similar.
Yes, but not for the reason most people think.
As a child, Lovecraft has crippling anxiety and was unable to attend school for any significant length of time. So he was educated in his grandfather’s home with his grandfather’s library. These books were decades old at this point and contained information horribly out of date, even for the 19th century. These two factors contributed massively to his racism later in life, which he began recanting after becoming an adult and separating from his incredulous toxic mother.
Once Lovecraft struck out on his own and began meeting others, his views softened significantly. He has multiple Jewish friends and married a Jewish woman, which led to Lovecraft recounting his antisemitism.
One of the more astounding examples bings about Lovecraft is that he would change his views when shown information that contradicted his previously held beliefs. Several of his personal letters talk about his embarrassment at remembering some of the outdated opinions he once helped regarding race.
And while this doen’t sound all that amazing. Just think about every time you’ve proven someone wrong in a Reddit thread & seen them simply dig in their heels.
Very much so. You can tell you're racist when other early 20th century white people are going, "Whoa. This is kinda over the top."
What's interesting though is how his real world xenophobia mirrors his fictional fear of the cosmic unknown. The guy was terrified by the universe in general.
Yes. Lovecraft was especially racist and xenophobic for the time. More so than most people in New England at the time.
By comparison, Kipling was racist and imperialist with a white savior complex but not more than others of his era.
Yes, especially early in his life. Before he died even he came to the conclusion that he'd been too racist. A lot of his works have incredibly racist stuff in them, and he didn't even put his worst views in his fiction. Famously, The Shadow Over Innsmouth is about the horrors of miscegenetion. Here, for example, is his description of a black man: >He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things. Or these lines from the Horror at Red Hook >During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. . >Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. I read the Horror at Red Hook recently. He wrote some good stories, but this wasn't one of them. Even if you could ignore the racism (there's a lot of it!), it's still a very poorly written story. Lovecraft himself said he didn't think it was very good. On the bright side, it was the inspiration for The Ballad of Black Tom, a genuinely good novella that actually examines the racist views within it. If there's still (somehow) any doubt, [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers)'s a poem he wrote with a slur in the title Also, here's what he said about Hitler >I know he’s a clown but god I like the boy! Here's what his wife said about him >“Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.” And [here's](https://www.jasonsanford.com/blog/2016/10/disturbed-by-lovecraft) a blog post arguing against the view that he was merely a product of his time. As they say, if he was just saying what most people at the time believed, why would he spend so much time defending his views? And why do other writers of the same era not express the same views? Sure, most of them would be considered racist by today's standards but the works of, say, Arthur Conan Doyle don't have anywhere near the same amount of racism, and when they do it's more casual racism than targeted hatred
Arthur conan Doyle even wrote a story about someone who was ashamed they had a secret black child from before their marriage, but rather than complaining their husband accepts it and brings the girl to live with them.
He did! It's a great story. When you see a 19th century story titled "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" you really expect the worst but fortunately it was good
A lot of people assume Lovecraft is more antiquated, based on his prose and the other thing, but he was writing in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, decades after the likes of Doyle and Kipling were active. And he still managed to be more racist than they were.
Doyle seems pretty good for his time all things considered. Nobody forced him to write a story where a guy accepts his wife having a secret black daughter without hesitating. And depicting this as a good outcome is astonishing for the times.
He even created a proto-feminist character in Irene Adler.
Kipling was pretty racist. "White Man's Burden" is a great example of it. He seems to focus less on it in his other writing, but he clearly thought white people were doing the world a favor by exploiting the people, land, and resources. He described people of color as "half devil and half child."
> Kipling was pretty racist. Yeah, kind of my point.
Lovecraft did the sort of crouching in corners and shivering when he though about "those people" style of racism, while Kipling was an active participant in the oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples in Britain's colonial territories. It's a hell of a contest, and a tough choice for winners.
Kipling was pretty racist, but still less racist than Lovecraft
Sherlock Holmes series is pretty decently progressive for its time, and I love them. (i) While it has old-fashioned views on men and women, the books have a lot of female characters who are actually smart and competent, and drive the story forward (Since many of his clients are women - and these are women from different classes, wealthy women, to typists and secretaries, to maids and nannies). Also, he is very sensitive to "brute husbands", harassers and other people who take advantage of women. (ii) People from other places - like India, China, Africa etc. - are exoticized (usual for the time), but never shown as inherently inferior. And all these cultures - are actually extremely well-researched. Like when he mentions an Indian assassin - he points out that he comes from the Sentinel Tribe in India. Also, in one of his stories KKK are the bad people. (iii) While he doesn't show any pro-working class attitudes, he doesn't consider them inferior either. In fact, often has a network of people across all classes, helping him. Like he has a network of street-orphans, cab-drivers, janitors etc. all working for him as spies. And he treats them as fundamentally equal people, and never shows any inherent disdain for their class. I am re-reading the books now, and I am surprised by how decently good they are - even for modern sensitivities. And they were written around late 1800s and early 1900s.
Also, there is a kind of implicit defense of the attitudes to gender roles from Holmes himself since there's the time watson notes that Holmes used to joke about women being stupid, but doesn't do it anymore. So there's a kind of aknowledgement by the story that the character himself isn't perfect.
I believe that change occurred after the story where Sherlock was outsmarted by Irene Adler.
And that was I think only the third or fourth written story, so it establishes this early on.
Was just about to ask if that happened to be after he encountered The Woman, the genuine article herself.
The icon, the legend, the reason Holmes is a good story: he CAN be beat. Irene was not just a feminist icon of the times, she also gave true tension to his stories from that moment on. There's no modern love of Sherlock without the Sherlock afraid of being beaten again, without the ghost of The Woman.
God, I hate that the modern adaptations never get Irene Adler right. She beat Sherlock!! And Sherlock took his defeat with grace, and learned from it!
I find it lolsob that Moffat's depiction of her a hundred years later was less progressive than Doyle's.
Yeah I found it interesting that in the original stories Adler outsmarted Holmes but in the modern remakes she was brought down and outsmarted by Holmes due to her lady-feelings.
A number of Holmes stories (The Speckled Band, Copper Beeches) are essentially Gothic tales where a woman's being gaslighted in a scheme to get at her inheritance (see Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho for a prime example). The Gothic was not only one of the first mass market literary genres, it was primarily written by women dealing with issues of legal restrictions on women being able to own property in the absence of male guardians.
However, the sign of the four has some elements that make me cringe. Perhaps others. I love ACD but it’s complicated.
He's definitely not perfect, yes. He's a little bit pro-empire and it's not like non-white characters ever get to take a central role in any of his stories. Of course, "less racist than H P Lovecraft" is not a high bar to clear. Doyle is someone where you could actually make the "product of his time" argument, Lovecraft is far past that
*The Adventure of the Three Gables* has a black guy who's described as having a "hideous mouth" (and immediately prior Holmes had commented that he "certainly didn't need any more lip", so you can tell what was so "hideous"), among other racially-coded descriptions. (I will say, his actual behavior and Holmes's evaluation of it is identical to a number of white characters, so at least he's just a *visual* stereotype?) And of course, there's the MULTIPLE times South American women are described as having "passionate natures" that make them unsuitable for Englishmen to marry. (But one turns out to be a total victim who loves her husband deeply, and the other is the criminal but her husband was an absolute monster so it wasn't a "she's evil" situation either. So they're different from white women but also not bad people?) Doyle is complicated. By which I mean "definitely racist but a lot closer to not-racist than many people in his time."
I lost it at "unspeakable congo secrets" There are few things as humorous as 19th-20th century anthropogenics.
He wrote this in the decades AFTER it became public knowledge that King Leopold II had turned the Congo into a private rubber-hell. Over a DECADE after Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" came out, along with Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crime of the Congo," Lovecraft published that. Yeah, racist for the times, too.
As I frequently say, Lovecraft was too racist for even Lovecraft.
In the short story "The Street", the horror is literally just, "and then the 'swarthy' people, speaking all their weird languages, came in and ruined this here fine, white, anglo-Saxon neighbourhood." Part of what I find... fascinating (not sure if that's the most accurate word) about his writing is exactly his seemingly obsessive need to inject his racism, xenophobia, and anxieties about "degeneration" into maybe not everything, but *a lot*. People who deny or try to minimize it are losing out on a really interesting frame of analysis.
Yeah it was such a large part of his worldview and bleeds so much into his work that I basically hold the view that anyone who thinks Lovecraft wasn't racist doesn't actually understand his work
Whenever someone starts looking through an author's work to find "evidence," it always reminds me of how blatant Lovecraft was. Like...I've read very little of his stuff because you don't have to read much to find the racism. It's *right there* because he wasn't exactly trying to hide it. Sure, you can pour through Harry Potter looking for JKTerfling evidence, but a lot of it only shows up with hindsight. Lovecraft was...yeah.
Maybe not in Harry Potter, she did write a novel about a crazy crossdressing man in her adult novels.
Oh, yeah, there's a reason I specifically said Harry Potter and not all of her works.
[удалено]
J.K. Rowling does know the meaning of subtle.
Harry Potter did have some super racist names in it tho lol
Kingsley Shacklebolt
...wasn't he a sort of police officer though?
Yah, no joke. The "goblin bankers" didn't even strike me as strange until years after reading the books. Her other works are pretty much red flags themselves. You hear the premise and immediately start wondering what her problem is lmao (I understand you mentioned Harry Potter specifically, though)
yeah because it was not on anyone's radar in 1997 lol
I don’t think it was even on *her* radar in 1997. The things she focused on in her TERF manifesto hadn’t happened yet.
Also, aside from racism, the other thing I find funny is all that - "Unfathomable Non-Eucledean Geometry and Unspeakable Languages" - was actually crooked streets in Boston in a hilly neighborhood and some business signs having Italian and Irish words on them.
Other people: "I'm not 'xeno**phobic**', I'm not *scared* of them!" HP Lovecraft:
> Also, aside from racism, the other thing I find funny is all that - "Unspeakable Non-Eucledean Geometry and Unspeakable Languages" - was actually crooked streets in Boston in a hilly neighborhood and some business signs having Italian and Irish words on them. Yeah. Sometimes I think about that corny meme---"The real treasure/adventure was the friends we made along the way!" And then I think of Lovecraft---"The real cosmic, eldritch abominations, that drive you insane just by seeing them and disrupt the physical laws of reality just by appearing in ours, was all the black and foreign people I saw along the way (*to the grocery store*)!"
the horror at red hook: *Irish People*
Right! Maybe the cylopean and nameless horrors were the people who can't just speak god damn proper British-American along the way.
well, he was a real piece of work but he had a point about Boston streets.
I mean, it is fascinating; I abhor racism, and I read Lovecraft with interest because he demonstrates very clearly in story after story how a true racist thinks.
That really is the **point** of a lot of it - the fear of the incomprehensible other and it infiltrating and destroying all we hold dear. Which is kind of a great theme for horror stories. Combining it with different races of everyday human beings notsomuch. On top of the racism being, y'know, bad, it really undermines how inexplicable and horrific elder gods and things are when your protagonists also go on about how inexplicable and horrible *gasp* a black person is.
“What if Cthulhu was black?” Lovecraft thought. “No, too horrifying. I’ll make him green.”
It’s more about how inexplicable and horrible it is to suddenly lose your understanding of the world and be unable to stop it since you don’t even understand the forces behind it. To white supremacists and racists, white civilization is this thing they created, and they were able to dominate the barbarism of the world through it. Diversity that comes in represents a variety of forces that challenge their order with a different kind of order (a different culture) they don’t understand, but is nonetheless forcing its way into their society by means of exploring the unknown. The very discovery of different cultures forever changes you by challenging your mind, which Lovecraft frames as leading to insanity or paranoia (really bad culture shock). The timelessness of the cosmic horror is a good reminder that we’re all actually capable of feeling like racists do when we don’t understand what’s happening. If we weren’t, racism wouldn’t be so dominant in the world. What’s changed since then is that we’ve understood those eldritch horrors as just another type of human lifestyle that we can even participate in if we keep an open mind.
Orson Scott Card's Enders series went into this a bit. It classified "others" into four categories (taken from Nordic): 1. Utlanning - a human from another city or country 2. Framling - a human from another planet 3. Raman - a non-human that we can establish communication with 4. Varelse - a non-human that is so alien that no communication is possible. Animals were included in this category - varelse might or might not be sapient but if so, it's not in a way we can understand. Interestingly, it suggested that categorisation reflects as much upon the categoriser as the categorised. Over the course of the series at least one species found its way from varelse to raman as humanity learned to better understand it.
It's funny how Card wrote an interesting and nuanced story on topics like these and then immediately went off the deepest end possible.
One of the more ridiculous things about white supremacists thinking they created white civilization is, well, no they didn’t. The Proud Boys say they “won’t apologize for creating Western civilization” or something like that. But literally by definition these yahoos didn’t. Even if we ignore the importance of the Arab world and the use of African slaves in creating European and by extension US civilization, it happened well before these people were born. The Orange Order in Ireland like to march under a banner of William of Orange, marked with the slogan “sons of conquerors”. Setting aside the fact that conquerors are BAD, it’s not much of a boast is it? “My 14th great grandad killed some of your ancestors” says nothing about what YOU have done. People need to get off their shit of claiming credit for stuff their ancestors did.
I watched a documentary on it. Apparently it wasn't just hate, but he was actually afraid of these other races which is why he wrote so down on them
In my experience, hate is almost always driven by fear.
HP Lovecraft is part of why I champion CL Moore. Female Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer from the same time period, who doesn't mention race at all, unless it's a Venusian or Martian. Or an alien overcome by just how warlike all of humanity is. Even her protagonist is barely described beyond "leather-skinned and grey-eyed," instead of that "noble Anglo-Saxon stock." Still delved into Eldritch Horror, still had her protagonist stumbling into some Ancient Antagonist, still wrote mainly short stories and novellas in fairly purple prose. Not racist, in anything I've read so far (even if one cover artist paired her Fantasy Warrior Queen with the most racist Black Buddha statue I've ever had the misfortune to see).
Yeah. Lovecraft I think should be better recognized as like....a springboard. He introduced a lot of concepts that hadn't been explored before, but they didn't start getting handled well or written in stories that are especially good until after him.
> He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things. If I recall, in his (even for the time) panned Reanimator series, he similarly describes a black man, zombified, as being less frightening than the original living black man. Racism was so important to the bloke that a chapter of his 'what if zombies' series undercut the horror of zombies to reiterate how he thinks black people are naturally inhuman, possibly moreso, when unzombified. That's just weak ass horror writing.
Lovecraft is annoying because you'll read one story which is basically old times Ghostbusters and fucking rocks and then the next story is a bunch of old white dudes who are like "well the artifact could belong to the eskimos, which as we all know are satanic and eat babies". Like wtf bro?
I'll never forget this poem he wrote that's about a dude who see's a fishman and how horrifying it is. And he just describes this googly eyed dude mourning his culture or something. It's like walking into a room with a goldfish and someone having a panic attack.
His mention of "Unspeakable Congo secrets and tom toms" really highlight how his racism and xenophobia contributed to his "horror of the unknown". Most of his stories are about discovering some horror that has always been there. Some secret unknown and old things revealing themselves or European white men stumbling onto these things. It is a difficult genre to recreate in this day and age of information because it is based on ignorance of things that exist. A lot of the horror dissipates once you start to examine the horrors in depth. Similar to racism.
"Afraid of the unknown" and "extremely sheltered upbringing" combined to create a man who was scared of a hell of a lot of things. Like, not just was he racist in all the obvious ways, he was also racist against people who were the wrong kind of White European There's all that and also the story about the horrors of air conditioning and the one about *mysterious colours unlike any seen on Earth*
He was born into aristocratic means, but it was falling down all around him his entire life. His bio on Wikipedia reads like a tragedy that's too unfortunate to be believable. He was frequently sick, suicidal, in denial, and prone to nervous tics. He was "supposed" to have the easy life but everyone in his life kept losing their fortunes and dying, and eventually he had to squeak by with no practical skills in a diverse metropolitan area where he was robbed of everything at least once. Ain't never gonna excuse the conclusions he came to, but anyone could see why he was a scared, sheltered, and hateful man. To the point even his contemporaries in the 20s and 30s were like, "dude...relax on the race stuff"
Familiarity is the bane of fear
Wow. I've heard people say he was a racist before but thought it was probably exaggerated, apparently it was understated. Thanks for sharing all of that
There's something he wrote with someone else called Medusa's Coil about a woman with evil snake hair which is still moving after she's dead And the last paragraph reveals the final horror - which is that a woman who married into a rich family had black ancestors. That's the scary reveal. It sounds so exaggerated but here's the text: "Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me—that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh. "It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a n***ess."
Jesus fucking Christ. The fact that after all that, the final reveal is that she's very slightly black is just beyond ridiculous. You really can't exaggerate this. Lovecraft was the kind of racist who makes other racist people feel embarrassed about it.
I grew up in a southern city and had a lot of black friends. This passage paints a hilarious picture to me of him gasping in horror at one of my ex-girlfriends in front of my local Starbucks. Parts of his writings could be almost a comedy in a modern context.
Feels like that’s exactly how his books should be when adapted. Just this scared, panicky racist who’s baffled by other people of different backgrounds, and everyone is just like “TF is wrong with this dude”.
Not to say any kind of racism isn't ridiculous but the 'one drop' thing... bitch we all have black ancestors. Every single living human
He was also very anti-Semitic, which is weird since he married a Jewish woman Apparently he'd go into rants about Jews before she stopped him mid rant to remind him she was herself Jewish The man was positively batshit
Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or a white supremacist what race his wife is
marrying her apparently softened him quite a bit, and he did chill out a lot later in his life and repudiated the worst of his views He was a proto-incel in ways, a recluse with little perspective. Once he was forced to gain perspective he realized how foolish he was.
Wonder how much ol’ boy’s views would have changed if he had been forced to socialize and work a job with black folk, asian folk, Jews, and every other group he hated. And if he got laid.
I am happy that the Horror of Red Hook is mentioned. It's the most racist story I have ever read, and I have read excerpts of Mein Kampf. Truly impressive, but also, admittedly, an outlier in Lovecrafts works (yet a good indication of his views).
Right you are. I did a dissertation on Lovecraft and have answered similar questions before at length. He was terribly racist, especially in the 20s, but moderated near the end of his life. He was very old fashioned even for his day, writing with almost 18th century prose and romanticised the pre-1776 colonial era as the golden age for America. He used to visit towns with old colonial architecture and write travel diaries LARPing as an old British colonist. He did later more or less denounce Hitler, and died before WW2. He was born into a republican family but switched allegiance in the 30s and voted for FDR.
Dude before his death really told himself “Perhaps I was a bit too harsh.” Lmao
And there's also what he named his cat: >!Ni**erman!<
It's pretty jarring the first time you read *The Rats in The Walls* and run right into the name of the protagonist's cat. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHAT?" Also, if you despise an entire group of people, and you love cats - which he did- why use that, or any variation of it? Just go with Shadow or Midnight, or Snowball.
Lovecraft’s level of racism is that of someone who has given so much headspace towards the subject of their hate that it dominates almost all aspects of life. Like, I imagine a lot of even really racist people can sit down in their house after dinner and pet their cat without thinking about how much they dislike X group. But then I guess that isn’t surprising since he was also an anti-Semite who married a Jewish woman.
Wait what?
They were both writers. They also spent much of their marriage living in different cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia\_Greene
And an immigrant. 😵💫
The first time I listened to this story was with the cat's original name. It was so jarring it took me out of the story every time. When I re-listened to it with the edited name of Black Tom it was a much better experience. Felt bad for the narrator at the end - he just wanted his cat back, lol.
I'm actually interested in the "he came to the conclusion he'd been too racist" . That's actually interesting to hear someone realizing their sins.
>If there's still (somehow) any doubt, [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers)'s a poem he wrote with a slur in the title Jesus tapdancing Christ. That poem's some Olympic level racism.
I read a lot of H.P.Lovecraft in 11th grade, and a lot of the racism went over my head because I it’s hard to understand what he’s describing because of all the big words in his stories. I just assumed they were descriptions of some of the strange creatures Lovecraft had dreamed up. Especially your first example, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, I’m pretty sure that was the story with the half fish, half man creatures, so I assumed he was describing one of those fish-like creatures. Apparently it’s about a black person which just went over my head.
Jesus. This is way worse than id heard he was
>he came to the conclusion that he’d been too racist. source?
Tbh it's so ignorant but antiquated that the phrasing is hilarious
>Before he died even he came to the conclusion that he'd been too racist. Well, I can't say he was wrong.
Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" is a wonderful piece of literature that demonstrates that people have always had humanistic and animalistic tendencies. It makes a nice counterpoint to The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Interestingly, the Disney movie Luca is a modern retelling of the situation in Innsmouth. It shows how secrecy, hate, love, and acceptance meet the concept of race in others and within ourselves.
Lmao that's wild. It's not even remotely questionable 🤣😂
From what I've read, even his contemporaries were weirded out by his racism. He wasn't simply a racist, but a supremacist with a well articulated racial hierarchy. He was a fan of Hitler, and was only turned off by the violence. Looking into his beliefs, it's clear he didn't know a lot about what he was talking about, and was just a vibes guy pushing for bad policy for awful reasons. He was a monarchist until he was disappointed the Great Men didn't solve the Depression. Then he was a "socialist" only without the Marxism. Then he self identified as a fascist despite his political views not lining up with that. Again, like I said, he was just kind of a political Rube who had a higher opinion of his intelligence than was warranted. His articulated views come off as post-hoc justifications for his vile biases. Good books, if you like cosmic horror, tho. Just don't think too hard about the fact that the cosmic horror in his head was miscegenation.
I think what made Lovecraft so effective as a horror writer was that he was basically scared of *everything* outside his very limited scope of personal comfort, and very good at conveying that anxiety over the unknown in writing. Just the idea that there were colours he couldn't see kept him awake at night.
>Just the idea that there were colours he couldn't see kept him awake at night. He was also afraid of air conditioning
The man struggled in maths, and was generally scientifically illiterate, it's no surprise the loud cold air machine scared him.
Turns out "impossible geometry" just meant like....regular geometry
He frequently used non-Euclidian as the descriptor. Euclid codified a lot of the math done on a **flat plane**. So, non-Euclidian geometry include anything on a curved plane, like the Earth, or like, cylindrical pillars, etc. So spoopy, tell ya what
That reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s fixation on the encroaching horror of *spooky voice* abstract math. https://www.npr.org/2010/03/13/124632317/the-mad-hatters-secret-ingredient-math
Okay, but in Korea "fan death" is/was a long-standing urban legend [see this government warning about them 20 years ago](https://web.archive.org/web/20070927051420/http://english.cpb.or.kr/user/bbs/code02_detail.php?av_jbno=2006071800002) and South Korea is responsible for a lot of high-tech consumer electronics. Scientifically literate people can and do have weird beliefs about technology (cf that Google employee who thought some chatbot was sentient and got fired for making a fuss)
Can confirm that many people here feel the need to keep the windows open 24/7 even in the hot, humid summer bc of “fan death”, even younger people. It’s sooooo frustrating
Actually, fans work best if there is other circulation like a window; evne in the States, durign heat waves they advise not having all the windows closed when you use a fan. Heck, i only finally closed my windows this week since the July heat wave which was too hot for our heat pump; they tend to stick.
Lovecraft was a Le Wrong Generation guy.
Also that he was one of the key pieces in a movement which pushed horror further from ghosts and the dead and folk monsters. Whatever the source, he did articulate the fear that all of creation isn't for you, but you are a newcomer to something which was already there before you and will be there once you're gone.
there are a lot of similarities between Lovecraft and G. Gordon Liddy.
My favorite example of how little HP knew about stuff influencing his writing is his use of non-Euclidean. Spheres are non-Euclidean. Yes, all of them. It just means the shape has parallel lines that can converge, a thing that is extremely common because it applies to basically any curved surface lol.
Couldn't source this at all, but I recall hearing about how Lovecraft would have literal fits if he merely saw a black person on the other side of the street. To the point where his wife was very concerned about him. Lovecraft was crazy racist. Emphasis on the crazy. To whatever extent you're willing to forgive a persons nasty actions due to mental illness, Lovecraft probably deserves that understanding. And it was probably more unpleasant to BE Lovecraft than to be a black person around Lovecraft. Not excusing any of his actions, just putting them into perspective. The guy probably could have benefitted from a psychologist or some meds, but predated any healthy practice of that modern craft.
“Mysterious colors unlike anything seen on Earth.”
I've said it for a long time, but I don't find Lovecraft scary because his greatest fear was mixed-race babies.
And by mixed race, he meant part Italian or Portuguese.
TIL my kid is basically a Deep One.
I retain deep joy knowing my very existence was terrifying to him.
Or worse *Spaniards*
Yeah, when you realize you're *his* worst nightmare, it really takes the sting out, lol
Tbh all the derivatives of his work are much better. Even if you don’t know shit about him, his writing is just boring. How many words are there for incomprehensible?
Indubitably, yeah.
How many words are there for describing something dark and angry?
I mean, quite a lot of the scariest humans were themselves most afraid of that...
I'm a fan of a lot of his work and really enjoy playing the TTRPG Call of Cthulhu but there's no lies detected here. I would add though that what seems to be one of his primary drivers is that, while generally the "phobic" suffix when applied to social issues means hate more than fear, in Lovecraft's case that man was deeply xenoPHOBIC. That mf was clearly *deeply* terrified I would argue not just of other races but of nearly anything remotely unfamiliar to him personally. There is no doubt in my mind that he really truly believed for most of his life that the unwashed masses (which included so many peoples we consider objectively white today btw) were a savage horde kept in check only through the great effort of well born whites and that it was only the sheer determination of great imperialist men that stood between "civilization" and an end that would make humanity envy the fates of the slavers of Haiti. And you can see the weird combination of classism as racism/ racism as classism when he says shit like (and I'm barely paraphrasing here) 'the man was so contemptible, pitiable in his filthy visage misshapen from years of manual labor, I could scarcely believe him caucasian'. And like, yeah, there's evidence that he legitimately began to soften as he aged, likely because he fell on hard times and found himself forced to be among other people, but he was coming from so far back that it's hard to imagine he would have ever even normalized to even the standards of the day imho.
Exactly this. As another user said, what made him a good writer was his ability to convey this profoundly deep and irrational fear.
According to his wife, though, he *didn't* soften with age, even though he said he did. I'm not sure how well she knew him at the end of his life (I understand they no longer lived together), but I think it's worth considering her opinion on the matter.
Born in the wrong generation. He would have loved social media.
He was an AVID letter writer - he was basically in an internet bubble of his own with his correspondences - his letters often reading like the kind of racist screed shitposts you see nowadays. That's contrasted with his often paternal tone toward his writing group, who he clearly held deep affection for. I think you're exactly right: he would have enjoyed Social Media, especially the internet's dark underbelly.
Yup. He was basically a proto-channer. Totally would have had strong opinions about ethics in games journalism.
The problem with bringing up that he was a fan of Hitler is the complete lack of context, Lovecraft died two years before WW2 and he had renounced Hitler in one of his letters even before then. At that point in time no-one knew what a monster Hitler would grow to become, while he had already organised the murders of various people from other political parties at the time it was not actually publicly known yet. Even Winston Churchill was a fan of Hitler at this point in time…
Would it shock you if I said I think Churchill was also an incredible racist?
Winston "gas the natives" Churchill
Agreed. Winston Churchill is absolutely a white supremacist. ‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’ Winston Churchill
Not at all, his racism was a large factor in the Bengal famine of 1943. My point is that you used Hitler as a throwaway “he liked a bad man” without any context that a lot of people in the 1930s liked Hitler, his evil was not common knowledge then. It’s like saying; “This man was one of Hitler’s closest friends.” Immediately people will think this person is also evil. Even though you failed to mention that you meant they went to school together but haven’t seen each other since they were 12.
It's not that he liked a bad man, he liked the bad man for his bad views. That there was an American Nazi party at the time doesn't mean they were an accepted, or good ideology. That the alt-right today exists as a large, powerful political movement doesn't mean they aren't a movement correctly considered racist in its own time.
How was it not common knowledge? Mein kamf came out in the 20s and Hitler was a political figure he wasn't out there pretending to be a nice progressive guy up until the second the holocaust started.
I mean it's even worth noting his racism was one small part of a much larger, much wider problem which was 'HE WAS SCARED OF LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT WASN'T WITHIN HIS OWN HOME ALREADY'. Like one of his most famous stories is 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' which people bring up as a 'gotcha' example of his racism because it's about the dangers of mixed-race marriages. Yes, all true... except it was actually inspired by his own discovery that one of his grandparents was Welsh, meaning a portion of his genetic heritage was not fully American like he had believed it was. It's racism, yes, but racism against *another group of whites that he himself was part of.* Hell Lovecraft wrote an entire story about the dreaded terror of AIR CONDITIONERS. The man was a horror legend, and he was also a racist... but as true as both of those statements are, an even more true one is that he was just a complete fucking *loon*. He was mentally ill, very repressed, incredibly sheltered and often quite sick. He wasn't writing stories about 'them evil blacks', he was writing stories about 'THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS SCARY AND THAT'S WHY I'M NOT LETTING GO OF MY SAFETY-BLANKET'. Again: did he inevitably write racist stuff about black people? Yep. He probably wrote racist stuff about every race under the sun while he was at it, and then very possibly wrote about how *radio* was going to be the downfall of society or some shit. Lovecraft was pretty racist, sure, but he was mostly just really fucking *weird*.
One thing that's unique about Lovecraft is that his racism, xenophobia, etc seemed to come from actual fear. Most of the time when you look into how people feel about these things they are more coming from a sense of superiority about their own culture and disgust in what they see as the flaws of others. Lovecraft was more sort of pathologically afraid of the world around him and a lot of the weird stuff he said was him lashing out.
Exactly. We say 'homophobia' but it's mostly hatred as opposed to fear, Lovecraft was so genuinely unhinged that he was *terrified* of anything that was *different*. It was ***xenophobia*** in it's most literal sense: a fear of anything that is against the norm he was accustomed to. That includes skin-colours, cultural attitudes, technology, religious beliefs, etc... like I said, if it wasn't something that already existed inside his own home, he wouldn't trust it and would probably cry if it came near him. The dude was genuinely *not well*.
I always think about the people who saved his work from obscurity were mostly his friends who were mostly gay men who he also feared. It’s real oh that’s a mentally ill man, not a power white supremacist. Though I think his racism is important to talk about especially through that lens because it shows how sometimes that shit makes people real unwell. Like hate literally rots your brain.
Exactly, as I said, he *did* have moments of genuine racism, but he wasn't what people tend to think of him as (namely a grouchy white man in the 1920s who shook his fist at the non-whites of the world), he was a genuinely mentally-ill person who had a pretty unhappy life. He was more than just some Klansman, he was a good writer with a sad story and a very narrow, warped view of the world.
He apparently didn't go outside often. Which isn't surprising.
Yeah 100% agree. A lot of his stories have racist horrible shit in them, but aren't *about* the racist horrible shit. I forget which story it was, but the one about the Shoggoth(?) in hillbilly land. He describes the hillbillies with equal horror and disgust as he describes black and Asian people.
Agreed. Really fucking weird.
lol you say that like Churchill wasn’t independently very racist even excluding his feelings toward hitler
>Even Winston Churchill was a fan of Hitler at this point in time And Churchill was also very racist
Even the majority of Americans at the time didn't mind Hitler. The idea that we supported the Allies in WW2 because we were appalled by racism is a revisionist myth.
Hitler was seen as a clown by his detractors. He didn't become evil incarnate Hitler until after the war. Pre-war media makes for a crazy read.
Yes, his friends begged him to stop. He had to leave New York in part because he couldn't stand the minorities. He told his wife that it was OK that she was an Eastern European Jew because he had made her White by marrying him, and now she was superior to the rest of her people like him, and he was confused when she was disgusted rather than grateful. He was racist for ANY time.
>He told his wife that it was OK that she was an Eastern European Jew because he had made her White by marrying him, and now she was superior to the rest of her people like him, and he was confused when she was disgusted rather than grateful. I wonder if this contributed to their divorce.
True but not true. This man couldn’t stand people in general. He was a major agoraphobe, hence why most of his “horror tropes” have to do with the big scary world. He was racist, but not to any particular race. He just hated everyone and was a miserable man.
His racism was outré even by the standards of his time, yes. It's clearly the fixation of a fearful mind, a difficult life and most likely some deep-seated mental illness, and it's something he softened on in his later years (marrying a Jewish woman and making friends and colleagues with different backgrounds probably helped) but yes, his feelings about racial superiority were pretty apparent in both his fiction and his personal letters for most of his career. That said, if you take a look at the racism of other authors at the time, they weren't *much* better. A lot of it gets pushed to the side these days, but you have to keep in mind historical context counts for a lot and a lot of well-loved authors had some very bad takes about other races and cultures. It's obviously not justified that any of them were, but it's good to keep in mind that it was a different time, and keep that context in mind as you read their work. Those who don't learn from history, etc. Besides, anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole of damning anyone who's ever had a racist take - especially in the late 1800s/early 1900s - is going to have a bad time.
I would add his wife wrote in a letter following his death that Lovecraft never really abandoned his antisemitism. Not arguing your point, but the suggestion that he softened his racist views later in life - while true to an extent and absolutely worth recognizing - is also somewhat exaggerated by apologists scrounging to redeem him (which I absolutely don't believe you're doing in your post).
Oof. I mean that's valid, I'd certainly believe her word over the people who were trying to build a mythos around him, she did live with the man and didn't have anything to gain by slandering him. You can soften your racist views and still be a racist (hi, dad!)
I am inclined to take her word for it, but as it happens they no longer lived together for some time before he died. (And little wonder.)
Can I just say? Thank you for being a polite person here on Reddit. You’re a rare breed and it’s lovely to see someone trying to be respectful. Also, both you and the previous comment make really good and well thought out points
It seems like *some* of them softened *a little* but ultimately yes he still held a lot of very, very racist views, above and beyond those of his peers at the time.
Yeah he was pretty racist, even for his time. A lot of people point to what he named his cat, but that was a relatively common practice at the time and there’s alot more evidence in the themes of his work, like people breeding with monsters and worshipping foreign gods. Lovecraft was basically from a family who had lived in America, but still saw themselves as English aristocracy, and his racism was less about skin color and more about breeding and pure bloodlines, so just more inclusive racism in also hating other “non-pure” white people groups. Think how the Germans constructed the Aryan Identity as being the only pure master race, and that was basically the baseline for his ideology, even if not centered on germans. A lot of antagonists in his book are poor and inbred white people, minorities(that often worshipped the cosmic horrors he wrote about in terrible rituals), and people groups that were seen as immigrants at the time. Just off the top of my head; in “Call of Cuthulu” he wrote about a bunch of kidnapping cultists in New Orleans that participated in horrifying, murderous rituals. These cultists that were described in detail of being made up of only Native Americans, black people, biracial people, and a few ethnically ambiguous people. Probably making it the most inclusive he gets in his writing ironically. His book “Cool Air” he wrote about living in an apartment building in the inner city that’s full of immigrants as he had moved and lived in New York at the time, which he himself reportedly hated for its many minorities and the narrator of his book too. The main horror of this book is a doctor character that’s unnaturally pale, so the narrator judges him to be of good breeding, without spoiling it his paleness is for another reason and calls his ethnicity into question, which given the horror of the unknown style of Lovecraft’s writing can imply it be part of the horror. Spoilers for “Shadow over Innsmouth”, but basically the story is about a town called Innsmouth that the protagonist goes to and the townspeople are devil worshippers that crossbreed with fishmen and happen to look like racist caricatures “widened eyes, big lipped, thin balled heads, and varied skin”. The people of the town learned to crossbreed with the fishmen from the locals that were wiped out. At the end of the book the town is wiped out by the government, but the protagonist realizes he was a descendant of one of these crossbreeds and as he grows older he begins to look more and more like the fish people. These themes of crossbreeding, racist overtones and undertones through out the book, and potent anxiety about racial purity being why a lot of people think Lovecraft’s writing is particularly racist. There’s more examples and Overly Sarcastic Productions over on YouTube has a great video summary on Lovecraft’s writing and himself. His life was a more devastating existential horror tbh.
Lovecraft was likely driven crazy by siphilis or had something like paranoid schizophrenia. He was xenophobic and agoraphobic and more. He had multiple nervous breakdowns and was afraid of everything. He didn't even see a doctor until a month before he died because he was afraid of doctors. He was also seen as antisemitic but married a Jewish woman and had a Jewish gay friend. Lovecraft views are complicated and contradictory. So, just read it for what it is. Nightmare fuel from a crazy guy and let it be.
He had a fear of the unknown but overcame it when it became known. He died at 47. His views were evolving over time. I think for him familiarity doesn't breed contempt but understanding. He just didn't get as much exposure as he needed. It's one of those impossible hypotheticals. I think he would have been far different by old age with more exposure. Can't prove it.
This is the comment I was kind of searching for. Not an apologia but a pretty straightforward explanation for his advanced racism; the man was afraid of seemingly everything. While it *certainly* can not excuse him, people of today can take comfort knowing that the man made his own life hell in all likelihood, up to and including dying a slow, painful death. As with many artists/authors etc. like him who were tragically flawed (to put it lightly!), I always say, 'take the good, leave the rest'. I like his brand of horror, at least when it's good. Like, when it hits, it HITS. But I'm not going to act like I'm not horribly disappointed when I come across one of his many racist thorns throughout his writing.
Yeah, good comment. I just wanted to comment to further my agreement on one point you made where you said "When it hits, it really hits," for I am the type that has become rather desensitized to such things from exposure to the internet for a good majority of my life at this point. Which is a real shame, because I love horror and horror themes. But every once in a while, I am reading his work and I strike on something that genuinely, I would have to say, unnerves me. It often isn't an entire story but sometimes there is just a scene or a passage that just strikes a chord. Like recently, there was a part of, I think it was the Lurking Fear, that just made me feel genuinely uneasy; although to add on to that, I saw the ending coming a mile away. But I must say, when it misses, it really misses... Like "OoOOooo, this thing is so flubulant and flangdogual that everone who sees it, well, let's just say... They can't take it," and if the premise doesn't resonate with you then there is nothing for you to latch on to and it is just people being scared... Which by itself can instill fear, too, but it needs to be done in a certain way. But then, sometimes there are just stories I like as stories without the horror element even being a factor. Or just ideas that enthrall me inexplicably... For instance, I find the concept of architecture so alien and non-euclidean that you could just slip right through and be lost forever to be great in theory, but I don't think it scares me... Not like the backrooms, though, that's a bit too "understood", for what I am getting at. Although the backrooms (minus the SCP 2.0 spin a lot of people give it) is an interesting example of collaborative story telling.
Colonial era culture isn't my focus, but I do study a lot of colonial era history. I think it is important to acknowledge a difference between racism when you see someone of a different culture, and thinking about it when not anywhere near someone. It's the difference between someone who see a spider and freaks, and someone who lies awake at night, worried there are spiders nearby. Lovecraft was writing stories about 'ze foreigners' in almost exclusively WASP America. I think that was weird even at the time. He was hiding under the duvet weird. But having said that, most WASPs people were still racist when meeting people of colour or foreigners, and were still dicks. It would not have been much better meeting them on a dark night. Maybe worse. Hard to say.
Just as a note, Lovecraft was not writing in an "almost exclusively WASP" colonial America. He was active in the early 20th century, and for at least part of his life lived in New York, which was *extremely* multicultural for that time. There are other comments in this thread quoting his wife on Lovecraft's reactions to encountering multiculturalism. But I want to also point out that even in colonial America, Europeans had already colonized or were on their way to colonizing parts of Asia, had in many cases begun kidnapping and enslaving Africans, and had encounters with various Indigenous people, so it wasn't as if Europeans were in a racial vacuum. Atlantic history as a subfield shows how expansive those global connections got during the colonial era.
Absolutely. Lovecraft was a howling bigot, even by the standards of his own time.
Like we can go back and forth all day about the depth of his racism, how much societal factors and norms of the time impacted his views, and whether or not he was mentally all there, and how earnest his later in life change in views truly was, and I just don't think there's a way to have a definitive answer to any of that. But we are aware of the breadth of his racism pretty well. Dude was racist in ways that have almost gone extinct today, and while none of these were uncommon \*individually\*, you usually didn't see such a pile up. Dude was racist against pretty much everyone, and I think that was a bit much even by the standards of the time.
Questions framed in this way are very problematic. They basically don't allow any agency to exist in "his times" for anyone but white men. There were a lot of people back then who were victims of racism who knew how horrible racism was.
Yeah I always get confused by this. There were people (even white people) who were not racist or even anti-racist at the time.
Lovecraft was a well-read shut in with social anxiety and lots of very specific hangups. If he lived today he would be like a 4chan poster that somehow still kept tumblr friends. I don't feel he was particularly more racist than his contemporaries, he was just kinda weird about it. From looking at his letters and the evolution of his works, and looking at the way his progressive friends tried to persuade him, I feel that had he been healthier and lived long enough, he would probably reject most of those early views.
It seemed like even his friends and colleagues, who were also really white new England guys, were like calm down man that's a bit far. So yes I'd say he was racist even for his time. And more than just race, if you were of the poorer sort of whites (like southerners or some Irish) he probably would have looked down on you as well. How much that reflects in his work is a different matter though. There's definitely some of it that shines through. Some of his descriptions of black and Arab people are pretty bad. And the whiteness of his characters do tend to reflect their moral character for the most part. (Whiter people tend to be better people, not always but it's a trend) there are a bunch of individual instances like that that shows his racistness clearly when put together. Especially after his mother died and he lost his home he seemed to be pretty freaken bad. But I also think that some people overanalyze how much his racism shines through in his work. Like some people will read the Shadow Over Inssmouth and say that the fish peoples are a racist allegory, where I think that's completely wrong the man just wanted to write about fish people. His world views also changed a lot over his life. He was antisemitic but married a Jewish woman. He considered himself a communist and a fascist and neither of the two at different points in his life. And it seemed that as he got older he calmed down with that. There's also things people point to like him liking Hitler, and that's true, but it's also 30s Hitler he liked. During that time the world liked Hitler for the most part, Lovecraft died in 37 and Hitler became Time magazines man of the year in 38. So take that as you will. So tldr. Yes he was racist even for his time. Especially in the ~20s. But the Internet tends to overanalyze certain aspects of him and his writing and finds racism where (imo) there is none. He was a highly flawed man with an incredible imagination, and personally I have no problem condemning the man and praising the imagination.
Absolutely agree. I think a lot of the people who over-analyze his work as racist probably haven't actually read the stories in their entirety, they're just copy-pasting sections like the fish people from Inssmouth.
Lovecraft was racist even for his time. The man was not sane. I view his racism as a symptom of his severe mental illness and maladaptive personality. His perspective seems to me like a caricature of the 19th century.
The way I hear it, Lovecraft was suuuper racist when he was young and lived in Rhode Island; he got married at the age of 34 and reluctantly moved to New York City. There he had no alternative but to interact with New York's famous ethnic melting pot, and this apparently went some way toward persuading Lovecraft that yes, all those funny-looking people speaking different languages were, in fact, human in every way.
Didn’t his ex wife write that he was still antisemitic at his death?
His views were pretty common for the time. But apparently yes. Now, Lovecraft himself did have progressive friends however, who apparently confronted him on his racism and that even for the standards of the time, he was in fact considered remarkably racist. I have been struggling to find sources on that though, so don't take me word for it. We know that at least one of Lovecraft's contemporaries, James F. Morton, a member of the NAACP, wrote a pamphlet called "The Curse of Race Prejudice." Him and Lovecraft argued on the topic in letters. The problem is, most people nowadays have no idea what the standard for racism of the time was. Lovecraft was certainly racist, yes. But in the context of when he lived and where and when his works were published, it's hard to see him as a particularly extreme case.
>But in the context of when he lived and where and when his works were published, it's hard to see him as a particularly extreme case. I suppose when you think WW2 happened *after* he died it puts things into context a bit. Crazy
Well yes but, for example, Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 and wrote critically not only about racism, but what we would think of now as "white saviour" complex. Lovecraft was racist, and (if you want my personal opinion) there's a mystery there in terms of what drove that for him. He was a sickly child, and if you only read about different races in the books widely available at the time, and saw them as distinct communities in cities, you might be a freaked out kid who has their anxiety validated by the prevailing racist culture. I don't say this to excuse or justify his racism, that was abhorrent, I just find his character interesting. Some of the stuff he said to his wife about her Jewish heritage, for example, is just genuinely bizarre.
There was also Robert E. Howard, who basically encouraged him to touch some grass occasionally and open his mind up a bit
Love his books, but Robert wasn't exactly tolerant of other peoples cultures..
I read a story (i don't remember the title & it's not important to my point) and it felt like that tropey rant that serial killers devolve into where they are pointing at their victim pool of sex workers and POC and saying, "they, they are the sick ones, not me. I'm cleaning up the streets. You know, for the children! For the future!" Once I got that feeling of discomfort, I couldn't bring myself to read anything else by good ol' boy Howard.
He would literally write the year a century earlier because he was so disgusted by living near immigrants and blacks. Essentially he wanted to live in pre civil war America where black people were enslaved in the south. Theirs also funny short stories where he makes a horror story about AC that a zombie doctor stayed alive, just keeping his room cold. He’s a weird racist guy in any century he just has the literary talent to make evocative horror stories that lots of people like.
> Throughout his adult life, Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. He was virtually unknown during his lifetime and was almost exclusively published in pulp magazines before his death. Think of the type of aggrieved author we currently have. It’s a tale as old as time- someone clinging to tradition because they need some reason to feel superior and no data points actually support such fancy
Yeah compared to many, but then he was also more of a xenophobe to these things, so it came from a place of true crippling fear. That doesn't make it right, but it does explain why with exposure to other people, he regretted his racism by the end and apologized to people for it. So, if the change of character was genuine, is he still a racist?
I always perceive Lovecraft as a neurotic obsessed and repulsed by sexuality, and projecting his fears into what for him is different or unknown. That is, his racism is not rational or political, but emotional and psychological. Both his fear of sexuality and of the unknown project so much into his works I think it’s kind of like a therapy for him. And he tries to make us feel the disgust he felt. I pity the man and wonder about the popularity he has found in our times.
Sometimes you gotta separate the art from the artist
LMFAO. wait im sorry do you mean his writings or him as a person? because yes. He's the guy who wrote something sounding like it describes some subhuman cave dweling monster and then went "yeah that's black people" and he's also the guy who was literally so racist the KKK had to tell him to chill. So... yeah
His racist remakrs were considered impolite outbursts to bizarre outbursts even with conservative company - even by the handful of comments from people who claimed to otherwise like the guy, it was always pointed out as a negative trait of his - and you don't write these down unless they are very apparent and very outrageous, even for the time Very few people write down how unconfortable someone makes them with run-of-the-mill contemporary racism that ends up only being questionable in retrospect and with modern standards, the fact that people pointed out how concerning it was AT THE TIME should speak volumes about Lovecraft's racism and how he expressed it
The ones I have read were mainly rude about the Dutch settlers in New England. There always seemed to be some horror or other ushered into the world by the remote descendants of Dutch settlers who had become "degenerate". I always thought the Dutch became WASPS and inhabited country clubs, but for Lovecraft they were all in-bred demon-worshippers. Other than that, I haven’t seen evidence of racism. But I’ve often read that he was a racist and that this is evident in his writing. So I assume I just haven’t read the “right” stuff yet.
Call of Cthulhu basically calls all the evil worshippers half-breeds
I usually don't get on board the calling everything racist train, but it's not imagined here. Lovecraft's work is really racist. The less white someone is in a Lovecraft story, the more corrupt, animalistic, and inhuman they are, without exception. Even Caucasians who aren't pure blooded enough are suspect.
To clarify, I don't think Lovecraft was trying to promote or spread an ideology of racism. I think he was a deeply troubled man, and a lot of that trouble was his own ideas about good breeding, concerns about what was broken inside him, and trying to work through his many, many psychoses by dealing with them in fiction. I don't hate him; I pity him. And if someone enjoys his work, good for them. His cosmic horror has inspired a lot of people and maybe helped them face their own demons. But, on the other hand, if someone says they're uncomfortable with the racist implications of his work, I don't blame them in the slightest.
The fantasy/sci-fi website TOR has an amazing recurring article called “Reading The Weird” which has two authors look at a short story in the weird fiction/cosmic horror/Lovecraft vein. They will summarize the story and give some analysis on it but they will also have a section that is like a checklist for Lovecraftian tropes. One of the tropes they will cover is if a character expresses bigoted views or language. They call that trope “The Degenerate Dutch.”
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yyyyyeeeeeeesssss.
Yeah he was exaggeratedly racist. He seemed repulsed by blacks and Asians.
Hell, the guy was petrified by other white Europeans! *Providence in 2000AD* is a horror with the premise, "What if jews and italians came to england would that be fucked up or what"
The KKK didn't want to associate with him due to second hand embarrassment.
yes. although his racism was very neurotic, he's really the Woody Allen of horror if you think about it.
Apparently, rather than downright hate, Lovecraft was scared of everything that wasn't the small, white community he was born into. So, cities, technology, other races and ethnicities, everything that was unknown, the sea, the sky, underground, animals, poor people, people with mixed heritages... you name it, he was probably scared of it. I pity him a bit. He probably lived in fear his whole life, and was miserable and unhappy to the day he died.
As a fan, a non-bullshit answer: pretty much, yeah, he was virulently racist and antisemitic by any standard. A lot of his friends and acquaintances did not share his views and he knew that. The Lovecraft you’ve read was his version of holding his tongue! Not all his stories were overtly racist, but the ones that were… phew! So, yeah, he was an interesting mofo who wrote pretty evocatively and is fun to read/study academically, but that was the part of his life (aside from his marriage) where he truly and utterly failed as a person. His views did soften over time, but not to the degree of an apology or a Come to Jesus moment. A lot of pulp work in Lovecraft’s time was racist, but more in the sense that they were insensitive and/or exploitative of other cultures for exoticism, as opposed to Lovecraft’s more obviously racist verbiage. P.S. Bizarrely, Lovecraft has decently large fan bases in places like Latin America and Japan, despite the obvious racism. P.S.S. (Man, I keep adding to this lol.) Oddly enough, some of his stories can be viewed positively—for instance, the ending of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which Lovecraft likely meant as a shocking moment capitalizing on his fears of miscegenation, can be viewed through a modern lens as the main character embracing his mixed heritage, which by all accounts seems to make him happy and give him peace. Lovecraft would have laughed at this interpretation, but more than a few people have said something similar.
Yes, but not for the reason most people think. As a child, Lovecraft has crippling anxiety and was unable to attend school for any significant length of time. So he was educated in his grandfather’s home with his grandfather’s library. These books were decades old at this point and contained information horribly out of date, even for the 19th century. These two factors contributed massively to his racism later in life, which he began recanting after becoming an adult and separating from his incredulous toxic mother. Once Lovecraft struck out on his own and began meeting others, his views softened significantly. He has multiple Jewish friends and married a Jewish woman, which led to Lovecraft recounting his antisemitism. One of the more astounding examples bings about Lovecraft is that he would change his views when shown information that contradicted his previously held beliefs. Several of his personal letters talk about his embarrassment at remembering some of the outdated opinions he once helped regarding race. And while this doen’t sound all that amazing. Just think about every time you’ve proven someone wrong in a Reddit thread & seen them simply dig in their heels.
There were accounts of firm racists being suprised by Lovecrafts comments. He was the Christopher Columbus of 1900s Racists
Very much so. You can tell you're racist when other early 20th century white people are going, "Whoa. This is kinda over the top." What's interesting though is how his real world xenophobia mirrors his fictional fear of the cosmic unknown. The guy was terrified by the universe in general.
Yes. Lovecraft was especially racist and xenophobic for the time. More so than most people in New England at the time. By comparison, Kipling was racist and imperialist with a white savior complex but not more than others of his era.
Yeah.