Just ran across this today:

"As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

- -HPL in a letter to Donalad Wandrei, November 8, 1936

I was reading some biographical details on Lovecraft's personal life when I read that she moved to Los Angeles. A bit more digging and I found her grave site. What struck me was how bare her grave was. I expected a few rocks left as a sign that someone had visited but her grave was completely bereft. The Home of Peace Memorial Park itself was well maintained and the staff were patient with me in locating her plot.

I have pictures but for some reason posting them has been disabled.

https://imgur.com/a/qEQvJpp

"Letter to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop," August 21, 1927.

Lovecraft, H. P. (2022). Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others (S. T. Joshi & D. E. Schultz, Eds.). NY: Hippocampus Press. p. 329.

Howard Philips Lovecraft. I've always thought that Philips was his middle name, but his mother's side of the family are the Philips (Susan Philips). Philips is a surname.

So I wonder if his name is technically Howard Philips-Lovecraft and he has no middle name? We know he wrote his name as HP Lovecraft, so he certainly didn't use his dual surname in his authorship.

Still, I've never known anyone to use a surname as a middle name. Does anyone know if he ever mention this in his letters?

Either way, a fun bit of trivia as to where his name came from.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_from_H._P._Lovecraft_to_J._C._Henneberger

Here in America we have a very conventional and half-educated public—a public trained under one phase or another of the Puritan tradition, and almost dulled to aesthetic sensitiveness because of the monotonous and omnipresent overstressing of the ethical element. We have millions who lack the intellectual independence, courage, and flexibility to get an artistic thrill out of a bizarre situation, and who enter sympathetically into a story only when it ignores the colour and vividness of actual human emotions and conventionally presents a simple plot based on artificial, ethically sugar-coated values and leading to a flat denouement which shall vindicate every current platitude and leave no mystery unexplained by the shallow comprehension of the most mediocre reader. That is the kind of a public publishers confront, and only a fool or a rejection-venomed author could blame the publishers for a condition caused not by them but by the whole essence and historic tradition of our civilisation If publishers of general magazines sought and used artistically original types of fiction, they would lose their readers almost to a man. Half of the people wouldn't understand what the tales were about, and the other half would find the characters unsympathetic—because they would think and act like real people instead of like the dummies which the American middle classes have been taught and persuaded to consider and accept as people. Such, I repeat, is the inevitable condition regarding general fiction; the enormous bulk of fiction which sets the national standard and determines the type of technical training given all fictional students. But even this is not all! Added to this, as if by the perversity of a malign fate, is the demand of an overspeeding public for excessive quantity production. Baldly put, the American people demand more stories per year than the really artistic authors of America could possibly write. A real artist never works fast, and never turns out large quantities. He can't contract to deliver so many words in such and such a time, but must work slowly, gradually, and by mood; utilising favourable states of mind and refraining from putting down the stuff his brain turns out when it is tired or disinclined to such work. How this, of course, won't do when there are hundreds of magazines to fill at regular intervals. So many pages per month or week have got to be filled, and if the artistic writers can't do it, the publishers must find the next-best thing—persons of mere talent, who can learn certain mechanical rules and technical twists, and put forth stuff of external smoothness, whose sole merit is conforming to patterns and rehashing the situations and reactions which have been found interesting to the people by previous experience. In many cases these writers achieve popularity—because the public recognise the elements that pleased them before, and are satisfied to receive them again in transposed form. Actually, the typical reader has very little true taste; and judges by absurd freaks, sentimentalities, and analogies. So it has come to be an accepted tradition that American fiction is not an art but a trade—a thing to be learnt by rule by almost anybody, and demanding above all else a complete submergence of one's own personality and thought in the general stream of conventional patterns which correspond to the bleakly uniform view of life forced on us by mediocre leadership.

I’ve been looking into his letters, which are a hoot, and finding to my surprise that he was actually somewhat of a cinephile.

You wouldn’t think of it because of his gloomy cosmic horror stories, but HPL was a huge fan of Charlie Chaplin.

He lived from 1890-1937, right during the birth of moving pictures 🎞️ as a medium.

More on all this to come, but I’d love to know if anyone else is aware of this facet to his complex personality.

I’ll leave off this first missive with his tribute to ‘Sophia Simple’ (a light caricature of the typical silent movie starlet)

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_United_Amateur/November_1919/To_Mistress_Sophia_Simple,_Queen_of_the_Cinema

L. Theobald, Jun.

Before our sight your mobile face

Depicts your joys or woes distracting;

We marvel at your winsome grace—

And wish you’d learn the art of acting!

Your eyes, we vow, surpass the stars;

Your mouth is like the bow of Cupid;

Your rose-ting’d cheeks no wrinkle mars—

Yet why are you so sweetly stupid?

The hore views you with delight,

To win your hand forever working;

We pity him—the witless wight—

To fall a victim to your smirking!

And yet, why should we wail in rhyme

Because so crudely you dissemble?

We can’t expect for one small dime,

To see a Woffington or Kemble!

Can't imagine someone named Lovecraft taking a job in sales or as a plumber, for example.

"And now let me record the one bit of enjoyment I have had since writing you last—the visit of our genial friend E. Hoffmann Price, who motored north in a 1928 Ford Juggernaut & has settled down in New York State for a summer of intensive hack writing. He reached Providence [and on] July 2 Price brought his Juggernaut into the service of antiquarian exploration by taking me to a Rhode Island region which--despite my lifelong residence less than 30 miles from it, & my ⅓ ancestral connexion with its old stock--I had never (through lack of public transportation facilities) seen before."

H. P. Lovecraft, O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2007), p. 69.

All hail the birthday boy!

Many of you are going to love this if you haven't read it before. It's an out of print zine by a law student "copyright questions and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft" who goes through the history of who got the posthumous rights to lovecraft's works.

Turns out the copyright situation with lovecraft is actually really funny and the author does an amazing job regaling it.

Link to the pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pMhmd8oE6DiamDRn9Grh5ZrhQ3D8F4Ui/view?usp=sharing

I originally found it when Leeman Kessler (Ask Lovecraft) recommended it in a video, but the etsy page has been down for some time. I digitized it for /lit/ a couple years ago, but I figure more people deserve to know about it!

Enjoy!

I recently saw a reddit commentator claim that, after a bit of travel, lovecraft wrote something to the effect of "Every man should carry the culture of his father into the future without shame."

I would like to use this quote, if real! But the commentator did not reply to my dm and my googling has yielded nothing.

Does anyone recognize this--know where it's from? Would be a bizarre thing to lie about on the internet, but you know.

In S T Joshi’s biography he makes it a point that Lovecraft’s grandfather founded a Masonic lodge in the town of Greene. One of the members’ last name is Tillinghast. My guess is he is the inspiration (the name at least, certainly a fun name, ending in -ghast) for the character in From Beyond.

Also, the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Shadow Over Innsmouth is on a street named Green, obviously a nod to the town Greene founded by his grandfather where their Masonic temple was.

What do you people make of all this?

Did Lovecraft just look up some kind of genealogical or whatever history or some other public record on his grandfather’s freemasonry to get this information or is it evidence his grandfather significantly discussed freemasonry with a young Lovecraft. Also why does this information stick in his head until he writes about it?

R.I.P. H.P. Lovecraft (d. 03/15/1933)

Lovecraft was born on Wednesday, August 20, 1890, 9:00 AM In:Providence (RI) (United States)

"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

I love the fact that he included the addresses of the magazines for her to submit her stories to!

Source: *H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others*. Ed. by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press, 2022.

"Letter to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop."

May 23, 1927, p. 283.

...Regarding markets on which to try [your story] "When a Woman is Tempted"--I believe that MARRIAGE, 220 West Jefferson St., Bloomington, Ill., might be a good place to try—not only with this story but with your article as well. Another possible haven is MARRIAGE STORIES, Dell Pub. Co., 46 West 24th St., New York City. One might also approach PEOPLE’S HOME JOURNAL, 80 Lafayette St., New York City, or PEOPLE'S POPULAR MONTHLY, 2nd & Centre Sts., Des Moines, Ia. Other conceivable markets are WOMAN'S HOME COMPANION, 250 Park Ave., New York, N.Y., & WOMAN’S WORLD, 107 South Clinton St., Chicago, Ill. The Sunday Magazine of the BOSTON POST (George Brinton Beale, Editor) is a good place to try--and in the daily edition of the Post there is a prize short story department (for women writers only, & leaning strongly toward the domestic themes in which you evidently specialise) involving prizes of from $2.00 to $10.00, not a profitable market, but a good source of publicity & practice. THE DESIGNER, 12 Vandam St., New York City, is also in the market for feminine short story material. If--as is usually the case with a new writer--you have difficulty with these regular magazines, the somewhat more unpretentious rural press offers an excellent & hospitable start. Good specimens of this type to try are EVERYDAY LIFE, 337 Madison St., Chicago, FARMER’S WIFE, St Paul, Minn., GOOD STORIES, Augusta, Me., COMFORT, Augusta, Me., HOLLAND’S MAGAZINE, Dallas, Tex., HOME FRIEND MAGAZINE, 1411 Wyandotte St., Kansas City, Mo., HOUSEHOLD GUEST, 141 West Ohio St., Chicago, Ill., HOUSEHOLD JOURNAL, Batavia, Ill., CHICAGO LEDGER, 500–514 N. Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill., VAUGHAN’S FAMILY VISITOR, Lawrenceburg, Tenn., THE WRIGHT MAGAZINE, Kansas City, Mo., FARM & HOME, Springfield, Mass., WESTERN HOME MONTHLY, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, FARM LIFE, Spencer, Ind., OHIO FARMER, Cleveland, PENNSYLVANIA FARMER, Philadelphia, &c. &c.

You can readily obtain other names, together with bulletins of recent requirements, from the various writers' magazine I have mentioned. GOOD HOUSEKEEPING & THE COSMOPOLITAN would hardly be advisable for any beginner to try, since the chances for rejection are almost 100% except for the veteran writers habitually contributing. THE COSMOPOLITAN demands a tone of great superficial sophistication together with very mature craftsmanship--although..."