The mastermind of cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft also written as HP Lovecraft, elevated madness and existential dread to new heights. In the early twentieth century, he shattered the imagination as history itself became unimaginable. Ridley Scott, Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, Joss Whedon, and countless others have incorporated his mythologies into their works, and his stories have been rigorously dissected in academic schools ranging from speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy to posthumans and human-animal studies. His cosmic universe and the grotesque monsters that abound within it have influenced video games. And his contempt for African-Americans was even greater.
The gods, having just created Man and Beast, create blacks in semi-human form to populate the space in between, according to his 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers.” In the predominantly black states of Alabama and Mississippi, he excused white minorities for “resorting to extra-legal measures such as lynching and intimidation because the legal machinery does not adequately protect them.” As his most corporeal fear, miscegenation pervades his letters and stories; he insists that only “pain and disaster could come from the mingling of black and white.”
This was never more evident than in the 2010 debate over the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious literary prize for fantastical fiction modelled after HP Lovecraft’s caricatured bust, which a number of writers came to petition. The “Howard” award was established in 1975 in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, with the goal of “giving a visible, potentially usable, sign of appreciation to writers working in the field of fantastic literature, an area too often marked by low financial remuneration and indifference.” It was intended, like most awards named after artists, to honor Lovecraft’s legacy in the field of fantastical fiction.
HP Lovecraft Cat name
It has been brought up in discussions about supposed racial biases, HP Lovecraft cat name “Nigger-Man” on a few times. There had been a cat by that name in the Lovecraft family until 1904. Some say Lovecraft got the cat’s name when he was in elementary school, when he was between the ages of nine and eleven.
S.T. Joshi, a renowned Lovecraft scholar who has made significant contributions to the study of weird fiction, refuted the arguments for changing the award, claiming that 1) the award “acknowledges Lovecraft’s literary greatness… which says nothing about the person or character” and 2) the award “acknowledges Lovecraft’s literary greatness… [which] says nothing about the person or character” 2) “It implies that Lovecraft’s racism is such a heinous character flaw that it invalidates his entire literary achievement.”
1. His mother and father were both committed to the same mental institution at the same time.
Winfield is a town in Illinois. HP was eight years old when he died in 1898. Rumors that Winfield had syphilis persist to this day, but neither HP nor his mother ever showed symptoms.
In 1919, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft was committed to Butler. She kept in touch with her son for two years, until she died of complications following surgery.
2. He aspired to be an astronomer but never completed high school.
Astronomy and chemistry, as well as the works of gothic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, drew him in. Lovecraft never finished high school and instead dabbled in his passions informally due to what he called a “nervous breakdown.”
3. He hardly ever went out in broad daylight.
Lovecraft would stay up late studying science and astronomy, as well as reading and writing, and would only leave the house after sunset. During Lovecraft’s childhood, his mother reportedly called him “grotesque” and advised him to hide inside so no one could see him. He wrote in 1926:
I am essentially a recluse who, no matter where he is, will have very little contact with other people. I believe that most people make me nervous, and that I would only come across people who don’t make me nervous by chance, and in very small quantities.
4. He was Harry Houdini’s best friend.
The editor of strange Tales asked Lovecraft to ghostwrite a column by magician Harry Houdini in 1924. Lovecraft determined that Houdini’s ostensibly genuine narrative about being abducted by an Egyptian tour guide and encountering the deity who inspired the Great Sphinx of Giza was nonsense, but arranged for a substantial advance and wrote the fiction regardless.
5. During his lifetime, he is estimated to have written 100,000 letters.
If this figure is correct, HP Lovecraft would be second only to Voltaire, a French writer. Lovecraft wrote to friends, family, and eager amateur writers on a regular basis, and many of them adapted themes, styles, and even characters from his work. Fellow writers Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), Henry Kuttner (The Dark World), Robert E Howard (Conan the Barbarian), and poet Samuel Loveman were among his most frequent process.
6. He was not a big fan of sex.
Sonia Lovecraft told a Lovecraft scholar after his death that he was a virgin when they married in 1924, at the age of 34. Sonia later claimed that she had to be the one to initiate all sexual activity, saying:
He seemed irritated by the mere mention of the word sex. He did, however, say once that if a man cannot or does not marry at the peak of his sex-desire, which in his case was at the age of 19, he became somewhat unappreciative of it after he turned thirty.
7. He was plagued by night terrors.
No, not nightmares: from the age of six, HP Lovecraft suffered from parasomnia, or night terrors. Night terrors, which affect about 3% of adults, cause the sufferer to physically move or scream in order to escape waking dreams. HP dreamed of “nightgaunts,” thin, black, and faceless humanoids who tickle their victims into submission, which later appeared in his books as thin, black, and faceless humanoids.
Lovecraft’s illness fed into, but also filled, his dreamlike, nightmarish prose. In a letter from 1918, he wrote:
Do you realize that whether or not the things about you appear to be as they appear makes a huge and profound difference to many men?
If TRUTH is meaningless, we must take the phantasma of our dreams as seriously as the events of our daily lives…
8. He was the inspiration for Batman, Black Sabbath, South Park, and many others.
At the very least, it’s Batman’s city. Many of Lovecraft’s stories take place in this world he created. Cthulu appeared in a South Park episode and murdered Justin Bieber. Without causing a zombie apocalypse, the Necronomicon is now available in all good bookstores.
9. There isn’t a headstone for HP Lovecraft.
In 1937, Lovecraft died of small intestine cancer. He kept a detailed diary of his eventually fatal illness, in keeping with his lifelong fascination with science. In 1997, a dedicated fan attempted to unearth Lovecraft’s body beneath the headstone, but gave up after digging three feet and finding nothing. Checkout: Top Digital Marketing Courses 2021
10. Cthulhu is pronounced ‘khlul-loo’ (just in case you were wondering).
Lovecraft explained how to pronounce the name of his alien creation in a 1934 letter to amateur writer Duane W Rimel:
The syllables were determined by physiological equipment that was completely different from ours. The actual sound – as closely as any human organ could start it or human letters could record it. Sounds like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first syllable gutturally and thickly pronounced. The u sounds similar to that in full, and the first syllable sounds similar to klul, so the h represents guttural thickness.