A dreamer and a visionary : H.P. Lovecraft in his time
"H. P. Lovecraft has come to be recognised as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century. But how did a man who died in poverty, with no book of his stories published in his lifetime, become such an icon in horror literature? S.T. Joshi, the leading authority on Lovecraft, has traced in detail the course of Lovecraft's life, spent largely in Providence, Rhode Island, and has shown how Lovecraft was engaged in the political, economic, social, and intellectual currents of his time, and how his developing thought informed his fiction and other writings. Lovecraft's reaction to World War I, the Jazz Age, and the Depression, as well as to literary modernism and scientific advance, markedly affected his thought and work, so that by the end of his life he had become both a 'mechanistic materialist' and a 'cosmic regionalist' who looked to his New England heritage as a bulwark against the meaninglessness of a godless cosmos. It was the wonder and terror of that cosmos that Lovecraft depicted, with poetic grandeur, in his work."--Jacket
Biographies
ix, 422 pages ; 24 cm
9780853239369, 9780853239468, 0853239363, 0853239460
46847945
Unmixed English gentry
A genuine pagan
Black woods and unfathomed caves
What of unknown Africa?
Barbarian and alien
A renewed will to live
Feverish and incessant scribbling
Cynical materialist
The high tide of my life
For my own amusement
Ball and chain
Moriturus te Saluto
Paradise regain'd
Cosmic outsideness
Fanlights and Georgian steeples
Non-supernatural cosmic art
Mental greed
In my own handwriting
Caring about the civilization
The end of one's life
Thou art not gone