H. P. Lovecraft: Difference between revisions

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
	File:H. P. Lovecraft.jpg
Born	August 20, 1890; Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Died	March 15, 1937; Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Occupation	short story writer
Genre	Horror, SF

Browse history interactively

← Previous edit Next edit →

Content deleted Content added

VisualWikitext

Inline

Revision as of 05:44, 3 August 2006

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, noted for combining these three genres within single narratives. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, but his works have become very important and influential among writers and fans of modern horror fiction.

Biography

Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 at 9:00 a.m. in his family home at 194 (now 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Unusually for the time, both of his parents were in their thirties when they married, and it was the first marriage for both. When Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic at a hotel in Chicago, Illinois where he was on a business trip. He was brought back to Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained for the rest of his life. His affliction was general paresis, which may have been caused by syphilis. He died when Lovecraft was eight years old.

Lovecraft was thereafter raised by his mother, two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, with whom Lovecraft and his female relatives lived until Phillips' death. Lovecraft was a child prodigy, reciting poetry at age two and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred young Howard's interest in the weird by telling him original tales of Gothic horror. His mother, on the other hand, worried that these stories would upset him.

Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child, and because of his sickly condition and his undisciplined, argumentative nature, he did not attend school until he was eight, and then was withdrawn after a year. He read voraciously and studied chemistry in the meantime. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation, beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette. Four years later, he returned to public school.

Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, after his business suffered severe losses, and the family was subsequently impoverished by mismanagement of his property and money. The family was forced to move down the street to 598 Angell Street, accommodations which were much smaller and less comfortable. Lovecraft was deeply affected by the loss of his home and birthplace, and even contemplated suicide for a time. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908, and as a result never received his high school diploma. This failure to complete his education was a source of disappointment and shame, in part because he was never able to study at Brown University.

Lovecraft wrote fiction as a youth, but then set it aside for some time in favour of poetry and essays, before returning to fiction in 1917 with more polished stories such as "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The latter was his first professionally published work, appearing in Weird Tales in 1923. Also around this time he began to build up his huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were the young Forrest J. Ackerman, Robert Bloch (Psycho) and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series).

Lovecraft's mother was committed to the Butler Hospital for the Insane, where her husband had died, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time. Nevertheless, she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained very close until her death on May 21, 1921, the result of complications with her gall bladder surgery. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss.

Shortly after, he attended an amateur journalist convention where he met Sonia Greene. She was of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, and, having been born in 1883, seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924, and the couple moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. Lovecraft's aunts may have been unhappy with this arrangement, and, although initially enthralled, Lovecraft himself came to intensely dislike New York life.^[1] A few years later he and Greene, who by this time had already been living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed, and he returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years. Due to the unhappiness of their marriage, some biographers have speculated that Lovecraft could have been asexual, though Greene is often quoted as referring to him as "an adequately excellent lover" [1].

Lovecraft's stay in New York came to be marred by financial difficulty, because his efforts to find employment failed. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, resulting eventually in repeated literary themes of complete alienation within massive, "cyclopean" architectural environs and teeming hordes of nebulous entities.^[2]

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street until 1933. (This is the address given as the home of Dr. Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.) The period after his return to Providence—the last decade of his life—was Lovecraft's most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing, including "The Mound", "Winged Death", and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer".

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument. That was not enough for his fans, so in 1977 a group of individuals raised the money to buy him a headstone of his own, on which they had inscribed Lovecraft's name, the dates of his birth and death and the phrase, "I AM PROVIDENCE," a line from one of his personal letters. Lovecraft's grave in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence is occasionally marked with graffiti quoting his famous phrase from "The Call of Cthulhu" (originally from "The Nameless City"):

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

Background of Lovecraft's work

Lovecraft's fiction has been grouped into three categories by some critics. While Lovecraft did not refer to these categories himself, he did once write, "There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' — but alas — where are my Lovecraft pieces?" ^[3]

Macabre stories (approximately 1905–1920)
Dream Cycle stories (approximately 1920–1927)
Cthulhu Mythos/Lovecraft Mythos stories (approximately 1925–1935)

Some critics see little difference between the Dream Cycle and the Mythos, often pointing to the recurring Necronomicon and subsequent "gods". A frequently given explanation is that the Dream Cycle belongs more to the genre of fantasy, while the Mythos is science fiction.

Much of Lovecraft's work was directly inspired by his nightmares, and it is perhaps this direct insight into the unconscious and its symbolism that helps to account for their continuing resonance and popularity. All these interests naturally led to his deep affection for the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who heavily influenced his earliest macabre stories and writing style. Lovecraft's discovery of the stories of Lord Dunsany moved his writing in a new direction, resulting in a series of imitative fantasies in a "Dreamlands" setting. It was probably the influence of Arthur Machen, with his carefully constructed tales concerning the survival of ancient evil, and his mystic beliefs in hidden mysteries which lay behind reality, that finally helped inspire Lovecraft to find his own voice from 1923 onwards.

This took on a dark tone with the creation of what is today often called the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of alien extra-dimensional deities and horrors which predate humanity, and which are hinted at in aeon-old myths and legends. The term "Cthulhu Mythos" was coined by Lovecraft's correspondent and fellow author, August Derleth, after Lovecraft's death; Lovecraft jocularly referred to his artificial mythology as "Yog-Sothothery"[2].

His stories created one of the most influential plot devices in all of horror: the Necronomicon, the secret grimoire written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. The resonance and strength of the Mythos concept have led some to incorrectly conclude that Lovecraft had based it on pre-existing myths or occult beliefs. Faux editions of the Necronomicon have also been published over the years.

His prose is somewhat antiquarian. Often he employed archaic vocabulary or spelling which had already by his time been replaced by contemporary coinages; examples including electric torch (flashlight), Esquimau, and Comanchian. He was fond of heavy use of unfamiliar adjectives such as "eldritch", "rugose", "noisome", "squamous", and "cyclopean", and of attempts to transcribe dialect speech which have been criticized as inaccurate. His works also featured British English (he was an admitted Anglophile), and he sometimes made use of anachronistic spellings, such as "compleat/complete" and "lanthorn/lantern".

Lovecraft was a prolific letter writer, inscribing multiple pages to his group of correspondents in small longhand. He sometimes dated his letters 200 years before the current date, which would have put the writing back in U.S. colonial times, before the American Revolution that offended his Anglophilia. He explained that he thought that the 18th and 20th centuries were the best; the former being a period of noble grace, and the latter a century of science. In his view, the 19th century, particularly the Victorian era, was a "mistake."^{[citation needed]}

Themes

Several themes recur in Lovecraft's stories:

Forbidden knowledge

In "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Many of his stories deal with the idea that the human mind is too fragile to learn the truths of the Mythos without being destroyed. The ability of the Necronomicon to cause insanity in those who read it is particularly well-known to Lovecraft's devotees, but any exposure to such knowledge is likely to cause similar effects; those who actually encounter the beings of the Mythos are particularly likely to go mad, although some of them seem to be less harmful than others.

Those characters who attempt to make use of such knowledge are almost invariably doomed. Sometimes their work attracts the attention of malevolent beings; sometimes, in the spirit of Frankenstein, they are destroyed by monsters of their own creation.

Nonhuman influences on humanity

The beings of Lovecraft's mythos often have human (or mostly-human) servants; Cthulhu, for instance, is worshipped by cults amongst both the Eskimos of Greenland and voodoo circles of Louisiana, and in many other parts of the world.

These worshippers served a useful narrative purpose for Lovecraft. Many beings of the Mythos were too powerful to be defeated by human opponents, and so horrific that direct knowledge of them meant insanity for the victim. When dealing with such beings, Lovecraft needed a way to provide exposition and build tension without bringing the story to a premature end. Human followers gave him a way to reveal information about their "gods" in a diluted form, and also made it possible for his protagonists to win temporary victories.

In several stories, such as "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", the only interaction Lovecraft's protagonists have with his inhuman creatures is via their human cultists; the godlike creatures they worship are never directly experienced. Even in stories such as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" where the Great Old Ones appear directly, Lovecraft uses their human followers to introduce them and establish an air of menace.

Atavistic guilt

Another recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is the idea that descendants in a bloodline can never escape the stain of crimes committed by their forebears, at least if the crimes are atrocious enough. Descendants may be very far removed, both in place and in time (and, indeed, in culpability), from the act itself, and yet blood will tell ("The Rats in the Walls", "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", "The Alchemist (short story)", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). An example of a crime that Lovecraft apparently considered heinous enough for this consequence is cannibalism ("The Picture in the House", and, again "The Rats in the Walls").

Inability to escape fate

Often in Lovecraft's works the protagonist is not in control of his own actions, or finds it impossible to change course. Many of his characters would be free from danger if they simply managed to run away, however this possibility either never arises or is somehow curtailed by some outside force, as in "The Colour Out of Space". As with the inevitability of one's ancestry, eventually even running away, or death itself, provides no safety ("The Thing at the Doorstep", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", etc.).

Civilization under threat

Lovecraft frequently dealt with the idea of civilization struggling against more barbaric, primitive elements. In some stories this struggle is at an individual level; many of his protagonists are cultured, highly-educated men who are gradually corrupted by some evil influence.

In such stories, the "curse" is often a hereditary one, either because of interbreeding with non-humans (e.g. "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920), "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)) or through direct magical influence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Physical and mental degradation often come together; this theme of 'tainted blood' may represent concerns relating to Lovecraft's own family history, particularly the death of his father due to what Lovecraft must have suspected to be a syphilitic disorder.

In other tales, an entire society is threatened by barbarism. Sometimes the barbarism comes as an external threat, with a civilized race destroyed in war (e.g. "Polaris"). Sometimes, an isolated pocket of humanity falls into decadence and atavism of its own accord (e.g. "The Lurking Fear"). But most often, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a malevolent underclass influenced by inhuman forces.

Racial attitudes

The distinction between the civilized element and the underclass, or between 'tainted' and 'pure' blood, is often a racial one. The narrators in "The Street", "Herbert West: Reanimator", "He", "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Horror at Red Hook" and many other tales express sentiments which could be considered hostile towards Jews (although several of Lovecraft's closer friends and correspondents were Jewish), Italians, Poles, Mediterraneans and Afro-Asians collectively. Racist views can also be found in his poetry, particularly in On the Creation of Niggers, and New England Fallen (both 1912). He expressed racist and ethnocentric beliefs in his personal correspondence. ^[4] He married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, Sonia Greene, who later said she had to repeatedly remind Lovecraft of her background when he would make anti-Semitic remarks. ^[5]

Lovecraft's blunt expressions of his views on race and class may shock the early 21st century reader, but his attitudes and the frankness with which he expressed them were not at all unusual during his own lifetime. Indeed, these positions were quite mainstream; official eugenics laws and bans of miscegenation were at the time legally binding in many parts of the United States and non-Catholic areas of Europe, while racial segregation was legally enforced throughout much of the United States. A popular movement during the 1920s succeeded in drastically restricting immigration to the United States, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which featured expert testimony to the United States Congress on the threat to American society from the assimilation of more "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," Greene wrote after her divorce from Lovecraft, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind." ^[6]

He was an avowed Anglophile, and held archaic English culture to be the comparative pinnacle of civilization, with the descendants of the English in America as something of a second-class offshoot, and everyone else below them (see, for example, his poem "An American to Mother England"). His love for English history and culture is often-times repeated in his work (such as King Kuranes' nostalgia for England in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath").

However, he was not always hostile to non-English peoples. "Cool Air" places class above race: the narrator speaks disparagingly of the poor Hispanics of his neighborhood, but respects the wealthy and aristocratic Spaniard Dr. Muñoz, "a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination." In At the Mountains of Madness, explorers discover evidence of a completely alien race (the Elder Things) that were eventually destroyed by their brutish shoggoth servants. Even after several members of the party are killed by revived Elder Things, Lovecraft's narrator expresses sympathy for them: "They were the men of another age and another order of being... what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible... Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"

In "Herbert West - Reanimator", Lovecraft gives an account of a just-deceased African-American male. He asserts: "He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that 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."

Other stories present white characters in an unflattering light. The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South," ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919) are common targets. In "The Temple", Lovecraft's narrator is a highly unsympathetic figure: a World War I U-boat captain whose faith in his "iron German will" and the superiority of the Fatherland lead him to machine-gun survivors in lifeboats and, later, kill his own crew, while blinding him to the curse he has brought upon himself.

In a letter of January 23, 1920, Lovecraft stated the following:

For evolved man -- the apex of organic progress on the Earth -- what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties? The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!!

Gender

Women in Lovecraft's fiction are rare, and sympathetic women virtually non-existent; the few leading female characters in his stories — like Asenath Waite (Asenath Waite is arguably not female at all) in "The Thing on the Doorstep" and Lavinia Whateley in "The Dunwich Horror" — are invariably servants of sinister forces. Romance is likewise almost absent from his stories; where he touches on love, it is usually a platonic love (e.g. "The Tree"). His characters live in a world where sexuality is negatively connotated — if it is productive at all, it gives birth to less than human beings ("The Dunwich Horror"). In this context, it might be helpful to draw attention to the scale of Lovecraft's horror, which has often been described by critics as "cosmic horror". Operating on a grand, cosmic scale as his stories are, they assign humanity a minor, irrelevant role. Consequently, it is not female sexuality the stories categorically deny a vital and positive role — rather, it is human sexuality in general.

The "Undescribable"

Lovecraft wrote: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." In keeping with this view, he often avoided giving detailed descriptions of the horrific elements of his stories; instead, he used his characters' reactions to these revelations to convey a sense of horror, while leaving the details to his readers' imagination.

In his short story "The Unnamable," he describes a debate between "Carter," a fictionalised version of himself, and a friend who argues that nothing can truly be indescribable, since entities can only be observed with the senses, and each of these can be described. Carter replies that spiritual things cannot be bound by the laws of matter, and so it is quite possible that such things are utterly "unnamable." At the end of the story, the two are attacked by a mysterious creature; when they both come to hours later, the only thing his friend can say is, "Carter, it was the unnamable."

Lovecraft's influence in popular culture

Main articles: Lovecraftian horror and Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture

Beyond direct adaptation, Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture, and has been praised by many modern writers of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Much of his influence is secondary, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many authors who would gain fame through their creations, such as Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.

Many later creators of horror writing, films and art were influenced by Lovecraft, including author and artist Clive Barker, Stephen King, film directors John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon, game designer Sandy Petersen, and artist H. R. Giger. Many authors have written stories that are explicitly set in the same reality as Lovecraft's original stories.

Lovecraft pastiches are common, and his "universe" is so distinctive that he is an eponym, describing things which are so abstract to human understanding, that merely seeing them is often enough to cause terror and insanity. In stark contrast, things in mainstream horror tend to be more recognizable and familiar to the average person.

He also held responsibility for the invention of the philosophy "Cosmicism" which was reflected in many works beyond his own, including the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The heavy metal group Metallica has written songs based on Lovecraft's works, including "The Thing That Should Not Be" and the instrumental "The Call of Ktulu." The former appears on the album "Master of Puppets," the latter on "Ride the Lightning." The Lovecraft influence is attributed to bassist Cliff Burton's fondness of Lovecraft's tales from a young age.

Scottish twee pop band The Vaselines wrote the song "Lovecraft" in honor of him.

Survey of the work

For most of the 20th century, the definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction were published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a considerable amount of other literature as well. With the demise of Arkham House, however, Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft's works - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories - which collect the "standard" texts as edited by S. T. Joshi, most of which were heretofore available in the Arkham House editions, with the exception of the restored text of "The Shadow Out of Time", currently included in The Dreams in the Witch House, which had been previously released by small-press publisher Hippocampus Press). In 2005 the prestigious Library of America canonized Lovecraft with a volume of his stories edited by Peter Straub, and Random House's Modern Library line just released the "definitive edition" of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (also including "Supernatural Horror in Literature").

Lovecraft's poetry is collected in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft, while much of his juvenilia, various essays on philosophical, political and literary topics, antiquarian travelogues, and other things, can be found in Miscellaneous Writings. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", first published in 1927, is a historical survey of horror literature available with endnotes as The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Letters

Despite the fact that Lovecraft is mostly known for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of Lovecraft's writing mainly consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history. S. T. Joshi estimates that Lovecraft wrote about 87,500 letters from 1912 until his death in 1937 — one famous letter from November 9, 1929 to Woodburn Harris being 70 pages in length.

Lovecraft was not a very active letter-writer in youth. In 1931 he admitted: "In youth I scarcely did any letter-writing - thanking anybody for a present was so much of an ordeal that I would rather have written a two hundred fifty-line pastoral or a twenty-page treatise on the rings of Saturn." (SL 3.369–70). The initial interest in letters stemmed from his correspondence with his cousin Phillips Gamwell but even more important was his involvement in the amateur journalism movement, which was responsible for the enormous number of letters Lovecraft produced.

Lovecraft clearly states that his contact to numerous different people through letter-writing was one of the main factors in broadening his view of the world: "I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge." (SL 4.389).

Today there are four publishing houses that have released letters from Lovecraft — Arkham House with its five-volume edition Selected Letters being the most prominent. Other publishers are Hippocampus Press (Letters to Alfred Galpin et al.), Night Shade Books (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei et al.) and Necronomicon Press (Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett et al).

Intellectual property

There exists much controversy over the copyright status of many of Lovecraft's works, especially his later works. Lovecraft had specified that the young Robert Barlow would serve as executor of his literary estate, but these instructions had never been incorporated into his will. Nevertheless his surviving aunt carried out his wishes and Barlow was given charge of the massive and complex literary estate upon Lovecraft's death. Barlow deposited the bulk of the papers, including the voluminous correspondence, with the John Hay Library. However, as a young writer with no legal training, his efforts to organize and maintain Lovecraft's other writing stood little chance of success. August Derleth, an older and more established writer than Barlow, vied for control of the literary estate. One result of these conflicts was the legal confusion over who owned what copyrights.

All works published before 1923 are public domain in the US. However, there is some disagreement over who exactly owns or owned the copyrights and whether the copyrights for the majority of Lovecraft's works published post-1923 — including such prominent pieces as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness" — have now expired.

Questions center over whether copyrights for Lovecraft's works were ever renewed under the terms of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 for works created prior to January 1 1978. If Lovecraft's work had been renewed, they would be eligible for protection for 70 years after the life of the author, according to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Works which he wrote as "work for hire" would be under copyright by the publishers for 95 years after publication. This means the copyrights would not expire on some of Lovecraft's works until the end of 2007, providing that no further laws extend the periods of copyrights within the US. Similarly, the European Union Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection of 1993 extended the copyrights to 70 years after the author's death, which would be 2007.

In those Berne Convention countries who have implemented only the minimum copyright period, copyright expires 50 years after the author's death.

Lovecraft protégés and part owners of Arkham House, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, often claimed copyrights over Lovecraft's works. On October 9, 1947, Derleth purchased all rights to Weird Tales. However, since April 1926 at the latest, Lovecraft had reserved all second printing rights to stories published in Weird Tales. Hence, Weird Tales may only have owned the rights to at most six of Lovecraft's tales. Again, even if Derleth did obtain the copyrights to Lovecraft's tales, no evidence as yet has been found that the copyrights were renewed.[3]

Prominent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi concludes in his biography, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, that Derleth's claims are "almost certainly fictitious" and that most of Lovecraft's works published in the amateur press are most likely now in the public domain. The copyright for Lovecraft's works would have been inherited by the only surviving heir of his 1912 will: Lovecraft's aunt, Annie Gamwell. Gamwell herself perished in 1941 and the copyrights then passed to her remaining descendants, Ethel Phillips Morrish and Edna Lewis. Morrish and Lewis then signed a document, sometimes referred to as the Morrish-Lewis gift, permitting Arkham House to republish Lovecraft's works but retaining the copyrights for themselves. Searches of the Library of Congress have failed to find any evidence that these copyrights were then renewed after the 28-year period and, hence, it is likely that these works are now in the public domain.

According to an essay by Peter Ruber, the current editor of Arkham House, called "The Un-Demonizing of August Derleth", certain letters obtained in June 1998 detail the Derleth-Wandrei acquisition of Lovecraft's estate. It is unclear whether these letters contradict Joshi's views on Lovecraft's copyrights.[4]

Chaosium, publishers of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, have a trademark on several Lovecraftian phrases and creations, including "The Call of Cthulhu", for use in game products. Another RPG publisher, TSR, Inc., original publisher of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, included in one of that game's earlier supplements, Deities & Demigods, a section on the Cthulhu Mythos; TSR, Inc. later agreed to remove this section from subsequent editions because of Chaosium's intellectual property interests in the work.

Regardless of the legal disagreements surrounding Lovecraft's works, Lovecraft himself was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos. By "wide citation" he hoped to give his works an "air of verisimilitude", and actively encouraged other writers to reference his creations, such as the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. After his death, many writers have contributed stories and enriched the shared mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as making numerous references to his work. (See Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture.)

Locations featured in Lovecraft stories

Lovecraft drew extensively from his native New England for settings in his fiction. Numerous real historical locations are mentioned, and several fictional New England locations make frequent appearances. (See Lovecraft Country.)

Historical locations

Copp's Hill, Boston, Massachusetts
Red Line (MBTA)
Pawtuxet (not extant)
Newburyport, Massachusetts
Ipswich, Massachusetts
Salem, Massachusetts
Many locations within his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, including the (then purportedly haunted) Halsey House, Prospect Terrace, and Brown University's John Hay Library and John Carter Brown Library.

Fictional locations

Miskatonic University in the fictional Arkham, Massachusetts
Dunwich
Innsmouth, Massachusetts
Kingsport
Aylesbury, Massachusetts

Bibliography

See: List of Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Works relating to Lovecraft

Academia

McInnis, John L. (1975). H.P. Lovecraft: The maze and the minotaur. (Doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge).

Books

From Fenham Publishers:
- The Gentleman From Angell Street: Memories of H.P. Lovecraft (ISBN 0970169914)
From Hippocampus Press:
- Lovecraft's New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927 (ISBN 0976159295)
- The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (ISBN 0967321506)
- H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Alfred Galpin (ISBN 096732159X)
- H. P. Lovecraft: Letters To Rheinhart Kleiner (ISBN 0974878952)
- Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue (ISBN 0967321573)
- Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (ISBN 0972164405)
- An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (ISBN 097487891X)

Documentary films

The Eldritch Influence:The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft (2003), Hermetic Productions Looks at the influence of Lovecraft on art and culture. (IMDb entry)

Adaptations

Television

Rod Serling's 1969-1973 series, Night Gallery, adapted at least two Lovecraft stories, "Pickman's Model" and "Cool Air". The episode "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture", concerning the fate of a man who read the Necronomicon, includes a student named "Mr. Lovecraft". Another five-minute short is called "Ms. Lovecraft Sent Me", about a babysitter and her strange client.

Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998), a Lovecraft sampler shown on Bravo! (IMDb entry)

Rough Magik (2000), BBC pilot for a Call of Cthulhu show starring Paul Darrow, a la The X-Files. (IMDb entry)

The "H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House" episode of Masters of Horror is based on the story and directed by Stuart Gordon, who also directed Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dagon.

Movies

Films based (generally very loosely) on specific Lovecraft works (partial list only; see The Lurker in the Lobby and Lovecraft's IMDb entry for a more complete selection):

Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006). (IMDb entry)
The Call of Cthulhu (2005), a short, silent, black-and-white adaptation (IMDb entry).
The Dreams in the Witch House (2005) premiered on Showtime's Masters of Horror film series.
Cool Air (1998), an adaptation by Bryan Moore starring Jack Donner (IMDb entry)
Cthulhu is based on the short stories "Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror".[5]
The Curse (1987), an adaptation of "The Colour out of Space" (IMDb entry)
Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) is based on "The Dreams in the Witch House."
Dagon (2001), directed by Stuart Gordon, based less on Lovecraft's story of the same name than on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" transplanted to a modern Spanish fishing village. (IMDb entry)
Die, Monster, Die! (1965), another adaptation of "The Colour out of Space" (IMDb entry)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), an animated adaptation (IMDb entry)
The Dunwich Horror (1970) (IMDb entry)
From Beyond (1986) directed by Stuart Gordon (IMDb entry).
The Haunted Palace (1963), an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (IMDb entry)
The Lurking Fear (1994) (IMDB Entry).
Necronomicon (1994), three short films based on Lovecraft stories ("The Rats in the Walls", "Cool Air", "The Whisperer in Darkness") (IMDb entry). This film depicts Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs) stealing the Necronomicon from a religious order.
Nyarlathotep (2001) is a short film based on the story of the same name (IMDB Entry).
Re-Animator (1985) is an adaptation of "Herbert West--Re-Animator", directed by Stuart Gordon, that has three sequels (IMDb entry).
The Resurrected (1992), an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (IMDb entry)
The Shuttered Room, an adaptation that changes the creature in hiding is changed from a Deep One/human hybrid to a deformed insane person.

Radio production

The Call of Cthulhu (Broadcast in Tasmania on Lovecraft's 100th birthday)
Jeffrey Combs reads Herbert West—Reanimator (Audio book CD by Beyond Books/Lurker Films)
At the Mountains of Madness (Atlanta Radio Theater Company)
The Dunwich Horror (Atlanta Radio Theater Company)
The Rats in the Walls (Atlanta Radio Theater Company)
The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Atlanta Radio Theater Company)

Notes

^ This situation is closely paralleled in the semi-autobiographical "He", as noted by Michel Houellebecq in H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
^ H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq
^ Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929, quoted in Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
^ See letter to J. Vernon Shea, September 25, 1933, No. 648, Selected Letters IV, Arkham House.
^ Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, Lin Carter, p. 45.
^ Quoted in Lovecraft, Carter, p. 45.

External links

[1] This situation is closely paralleled in the semi-autobiographical "He", as noted by Michel Houellebecq in H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

[2] H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq

[3] Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929, quoted in Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos

[4] See letter to J. Vernon Shea, September 25, 1933, No. 648, Selected Letters IV, Arkham House.

[5] Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, Lin Carter, p. 45.

[6] Quoted in Lovecraft, Carter, p. 45.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

@@ Line 135: / Line 135: @@
 The heavy metal group [[Metallica]] has written songs based on Lovecraft's works, including "The Thing That Should Not Be" and the instrumental "The Call of Ktulu." The former appears on the album "Master of Puppets," the latter on "Ride the Lightning." The Lovecraft influence is attributed to bassist [[Cliff Burton]]'s fondness of Lovecraft's tales from a young age.
+Scottish [[twee pop]] band [[The Vaselines]] wrote the song "Lovecraft" in honor of him.
 ==Survey of the work==