HP Lovecraft A Racist Fiend?

The Rats in the Walls alluded to it, The Horror at Red Hook beat us over the head with it – but the question still stands: was the talented and controversial writer of cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, revered across the world for his flamboyant, corpulent horror fiction, a massively racist bigot?
 I have a lurking feeling that re-printing the phrases Lovecraft uses in his work would get this sorry salvatory of bloggy flesh sent down immediately, so I can only allude to his verbal assaults against black people, Asians, Indians and Arabs in passing – but anyone who flips through a copy of Lovecraft’s fiction will most certainly know what I’m talking about it.

 Lovecraft sure as hell wasn’t violently racist – his wife, Sonia Haft Greene, often commented that he would, to cut a long story short, go ape-shit around foreigners but this is the only solid evidence other than Lovecraft’s fiction that implies he was stoically, enthusiastically or passionately racist. The old wives’ tale that he was contacted by an emerging National Sozialismus Partei during the early thirties has been disproved by numerous scholars – S.T Joshi couldn’t find a trace of evidence that even alluded to this kind of lunatic theory, yet the racist label remains steadfast and difficult to remove.

 Of course, perhaps one loses sight of the fact that Lovecraft, for all his wonderful horror fiction, was something of a reclusive snob, who certainly held prejudices against the crude, uncultured American masses – so why shouldn’t he hold the same disdain against foreigners? By the same token perhaps he, not unlike Conrad, Waugh and, I suppose Fitzgerald, was simply a product of a generation which held racism as a common value – a fundamental pillar of a society which had an irrational fear for immigrants.


Personally, I think the fiction actually speaks for itself – I’m not even referring to the cat called n***** man, or the ‘grotesque negroid features’ of a black boxer. Anybody who scares the shit out of people by writing about creatures which, fundamentally are aliens, is bound to be housing some kind of racial views – the creatures and hideous creations of his fiction are, perhaps, simply crude allegories to illustrate his own racial venom in an acceptable medium. Hell, I don’t know.