Rabidly racist, pathologically phobic about frigidity (the weather, not his own – although that may have been the case as well) and miserably misogynistic, Lovecraft opens a whole new chapter on the meaning of ‘dysfunctional’.
Growing up, as he did, in a most unusual and highly eccentric family – his father died (of dementia caused by syphilis) in Butler’s Hospital, an insane asylum, as did his mother (in the same asylum) – he was raised by two maiden aunts. As a child his mother treated him like a girl and his hair was worn long until the age of six. Due to childhood illness he did not receive much in the way of formal schooling and he claimed to have had a number of nervous breakdowns in his youth including a severe one in 1908 that caused him to leave high school – after a mere two and a half years – without a diploma. He was often on the edge of suicide, particularly after the death of his grandfather (and the family’s subsequent ejection from the mansion in which they lived) and of his mother.
His stories rarely mention women and, although he had a girlfriend – Winifred Virginia Jackson (that is, he had a friend who was a girl) – his cohabitation with his wife Sonia Haft Greene lasted scarcely ten months, after which he moved into a single room in the squalid Red Hook area of Brooklyn, with Sonia merely returning from time to time to New York.
His racism and xenophobia knew no bounds (even though Sonia was Jewish) and his hatred and fear extended to what he clearly regarded as ‘degenerates’ of his own race. As such he would have no doubt had much sympathy with the American eugenics movement of the period – second only to that of Nazi Germany.
Yet, for all these peculiarities, he is now regarded as the father of modern horror and has influenced most of today’s seminal writers in that genre:
As Stephen King wrote in his ‘Danse Macabre’, Lovecraft “...opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them...[T]he reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which underlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.”
Growing up, as he did, in a most unusual and highly eccentric family – his father died (of dementia caused by syphilis) in Butler’s Hospital, an insane asylum, as did his mother (in the same asylum) – he was raised by two maiden aunts. As a child his mother treated him like a girl and his hair was worn long until the age of six. Due to childhood illness he did not receive much in the way of formal schooling and he claimed to have had a number of nervous breakdowns in his youth including a severe one in 1908 that caused him to leave high school – after a mere two and a half years – without a diploma. He was often on the edge of suicide, particularly after the death of his grandfather (and the family’s subsequent ejection from the mansion in which they lived) and of his mother.
His stories rarely mention women and, although he had a girlfriend – Winifred Virginia Jackson (that is, he had a friend who was a girl) – his cohabitation with his wife Sonia Haft Greene lasted scarcely ten months, after which he moved into a single room in the squalid Red Hook area of Brooklyn, with Sonia merely returning from time to time to New York.
His racism and xenophobia knew no bounds (even though Sonia was Jewish) and his hatred and fear extended to what he clearly regarded as ‘degenerates’ of his own race. As such he would have no doubt had much sympathy with the American eugenics movement of the period – second only to that of Nazi Germany.
Yet, for all these peculiarities, he is now regarded as the father of modern horror and has influenced most of today’s seminal writers in that genre:
As Stephen King wrote in his ‘Danse Macabre’, Lovecraft “...opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them...[T]he reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which underlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.”
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