re: #97 Dr Lizardo

H.P. Lovecraft was a talented writer (hell, he created an entire genre of horror) but a genuinely awful person with deeply-rooted racist ideas, which seeped into his writings from time to time.

sigh…Lovecraft was most assuredly not a “genuinely awful person with deeply rooted racist ideas.” He was a damaged person who was raised by a succession of women, and whose father died from tertiary syphilis in an insane asylum. I would imagine that haunted him, especially with his mother also dying insane. He was largely self-educated, which means that his world view well into his twenties was generated by the various eighteenth-century writers he encountered through his grandfather’s library. Adding to his misery was that he was born into an upper-crust portion of Providence society, but a business failing forced him and his mother into a lower middle-class world that his mother clearly wasn’t designed for. Read his 5 volume letters collection and you’ll encounter someone who is actually genuinely funny and whose warmth for other writers sparked numerous famous authors, including Robert Bloch. As for his “deeply rooted racist ideas,” he had no more of them than Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Faulkner, or Ernest Hemingway. Consider that what we would now rightly consider “deeply racist” in his works—for instance, his continual reference to the residents of various small towns devolving due to intermixture with foreign blood (my paraphrase there) was, until well into the late 1930’s, considered pretty standard stuff. You can even see this sort of thing in Toynbee and Will Durant. Genetics was a fairly new field. Anthropology was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today, and it was perfectly reasonable, for instance, for academics to argue that the black cultures in Africa weren’t capable of creating the kinds of works in places like Timbuktoo that we now know they did in fact create. Hence, the argument that Phoenicians were responsible for much of black African ancient culture. Well, sorry. Lovecraft gets a lot of unfair press.