Was Lovecraft meming his racism?

Luckily, the hybrid Irish race known as gingers will go extinct soon

Also, @Senior Lexmechanic and @Toucan
Any books about Lovecraft i.e. biography or analysis do you recommend apart from his letters? I find him eerily fascinating.
Anything by S.T. Joshi is pretty good; I'd highly recommend his book H.P. Lovecraft's Nightmare Countries: The Master of Cosmic Horror as a good starting point for biographical research. Some interesting trivia about him from that book:
-Lovecraft is the human being with the most primary physical documentation about them in history, due to his habit of saving copies of every letter he wrote or was sent and his extensive diary-keeping.
-Lovecraft's mother believed he was "hideously deformed" and had an irrational fear that other adults might accidentally injure him; these delusions likely contributed to his feelings of isolation and self-loathing later on in life.
-Like I mentioned earlier, he was a massive Araboo due to his aunts' ownership of a copy of 1001 Nights. His fascination with Arabia sparked a passion for astronomy in him; a passion he had to shelf as he matured, as his poor eyesight prevented him from working in the field.
-For his 18th birthday, Lovecraft rode the trams of Providence all day, alone and in silence, as he had few friends and his aunts were cold towards him.
-He would send letters to a number of friends in which they would pretend to be 17th-18th century landowners; a kind of proto-forum RPing. (this leads me to the conclusion that if Lovecraft were alive today, he'd probably have ended up a tripfag on 4chan).
 
i just wanna know why is mouth is so weird
h_p_lovecraft_alone.jpg
 
I think Lovecraft held typical racial views for the era. His natural pessimism, in combination with his penchant for the weird, made his views more florid and exciting. It was all about the unknowable other, the alien. This was just an extension of that.
 
The kinda of racism he had wasn't normal for the time he lived thou. This is a man who into the 1930s hated the Irish and Germans. He literally wished New England was still a colony of the crown. Even for his day he was way out there with his racism compared to what may have been the contemporary norm. He was a pariah for his time, and his work reflected that.
Lovecraft lived most of his life during a time when the Klan was publicly supported by congress in Washington DC and Hitler was able to gain wide enough support to become Chancellor of Germany. He was pretty ordinary in his racism, especially among the company of pulp writers. The only reason it's more visible is because people still read Lovecraft's stories and not Mayor Buford T. Undersleeve's journal.

Seriously, this was a time when in certain parts of the south you could buy postcards depicting lynchings. But yes, the sperg that lived alone with cats in Providence was "wasn't normal for his time".
 
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I think some of the Yellow Peril stuff may have been done with a bit of a knowing wink. At the time, the Weird Fiction subgenre that Lovecraft was trying to break into was chock full of the Buck Rogers-type "Mongol Hordes conquer America/Western Civilization in the Far Future" scenario, and Lovecraft uses it like a throwaway reference in what I think is a self-referentially derisive kind of way in "Shadow Out of Time" and "He"
 
Luckily, the hybrid Irish race known as gingers will go extinct soon

Also, @Senior Lexmechanic and @Toucan
Any books about Lovecraft i.e. biography or analysis do you recommend apart from his letters? I find him eerily fascinating.

I recommend the HP Lovecraft Literary podcast at hppodcraft.com. They do in depth analysis of all of his works and talk about his racism. I used to think that his racism was a canard thrown out there by people who didnt understand his works but it seems that it really was a major part of him and is just something that cant be ignored because it informed a significant proportion of his early work.

I also dread the day when the blue haired harpies come for HP with their pitchforks. He is the one writer that should not be pushed into the hands of white supremacists. If ever you find yourself arguing with someone who thinks that Lovecraft should be banned or whatever just remind them of his journey. Towards the end of his life he really did mellow out and had even renounced many of his old beliefs on race as juvenile and shameful. Towards the end he had be come very close friends with all manner of people who he had once hated. Jews and Gays and Blacks and Mexicans.
 
I always thought it was funny he was openly anti semetic yet married to a Jewess.

He also mentored Robert Bloch despite the fact that he was Jewish. He doesn't appear to have actually mistreated anyone because of his racism. It was, though, actually fairly virulent even for the time, and spread out over all kinds of targets that usually wouldn't have been. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he also goes on fairly knowledgeably about things like golems and dybbuks and other kabbalistic stuff and is fairly complimentary about their literature.

He was an odd duck, and while he was definitely racist, it's really simplifying his outlook to act like that really defines his character by itself.

It's also why the SJW idiocy of immediately dismissing a person as being absolute garbage, pretty much the instant they show any kind of human flaws, is itself absolute garbage.

Lovecraft's writing is fucking terrible.

What people have done with the mythos Lovecraft created can be pretty good.

It ranges from excellent to terrible. The terrible is when he lets his flaws completely take over and just starts spewing adjectives like unimaginable and indescribable and so on. Bitch, you're a writer, it's your job to describe that shit.
 
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