Do we like H.P. Lovecraft?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long record of hostility to Black people, Jews and immigrants in his stories, with little verified good to set against it.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890 and spent most of his life there. He was a sickly kid, mostly schooled at home, who read voraciously, loved Poe and astronomy, and never finished high school. He started out in the amateur press world in the 1910s before Weird Tales began buying his stories in the 1920s.
He married Sonia Greene in 1924 and lived in New York for two years before they separated and he went back to Providence. The Irish Times says his hatred of 'ethnics' flourished during that unhappy New York stay. He died in 1937, short of money and mostly unknown outside the pulp magazines, leaving more than 60 short stories and a few longer works.
The Call of Cthulhu came out in Weird Tales in 1928 and became the seed of the whole Cthulhu Mythos. Friends later set up Arkham House to keep his work in print, and his influence on horror and games since is enormous. That's the bit that's hard to argue with.
Now the harm check. Critics point to The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a story about a narrator who discovers he shares ancestry with a group of immigrants, and to The Horror at Red Hook, which Yahoo's reporting says portrays migrant communities as 'hordes of prowlers'. The New Republic argues his hostility ran through major works and extended to Black Americans, immigrants and Jews, not just a few asides. The Irish Times calls his racism jolting 'even by the standards of the '20s and '30s'.
The fight over him got proper traction in 2015, when The World reported a petition to drop his bust from the World Fantasy Award. Writer Daniel José Older led the push, saying fantasy shouldn't keep 'lionising a man who used literature as a weapon against entire races.' The trophy was changed in 2016. His scholar S.T. Joshi argues he's been unfairly vilified and that other great writers had ugly views too, and horror author Ramsey Campbell says his achievements outweigh his faults. Where you land depends on whether you can separate the stories from the man.
On the good-person side, the record we could confirm is thin. We read nothing on cruelty to individuals or any court trouble, but we also couldn't confirm the stories of generous mentoring of younger writers from a page we opened, so we won't lean on them. Nothing new has come up on him lately beyond the usual film and comic adaptations. The most that's changed is that Black writers, like those behind Lovecraft Country, now use his world to turn his prejudices back on him.