Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth", both canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor. He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time that he died at age 46.

The diversity of H. P. Lovecraft's correspondents is exemplified in this volume, as are important aspects of his literary and professional career. His involvement with the pulp magazine Weird Tales is reflected in letters to J. C. Henneberger (the magazine's owner) and its first two editors, Edwin Baird and Farnsworth Wright. Here we learn little-known details of the magazine's initial year of publication, Lovecraft's work as ghostwriter for Harry Houdini, a proposed collection of his stories that the magazine was planning to issue, and other vital subjects.Philosophy is the dominant concern in the letters to an obscure Vermont correspondent, Woodburn Harris. Harris was a curious mix of radical politics and social naïveté, and Lovecraft's long, argumentative letters run the gamut of subject-matter: female sexuality, the fall of the Roman Empire, the distinction between ethics, and much more. Lovecraft's work as a revisionist is fully exhibited in the letters to Zealia Bishop (many of which came to light only recently) and William Lumley. But Lovecraft never lost his devotion to amateur journalism, and his late letters to Walter J. Coates, editor of Driftwind, tell of his fascination with Coates's promotion of a distinctive literary and political culture in his native Vermont.As with preceding volumes of this series, all the letters in this volume have been meticulously edited by careful comparison with original manuscripts, and have been exhaustively annotated by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.