![]() ![]() ![]() Of British ancestry, his literary influences, too, were British - Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany particularly - rather than American in the Gothic tradition of Poe, though at least one of his stories, The Outsider, might very well have been written by Poe. He began to write early in life, but did not achieve publications in any national magazine until he was in his twenties. In the scarcely two decades of his writing life, Lovecraft became the master of the macabre who had no contemporary peer in America. In his conversation, his vocabulary was revealed to be of astonishing range and instant application his fiction, too, gives evidence of his range. His jaw protruded, but his character was gentle. ![]() He was tall and thin, and usually almost spectrally pale, though his eyes were bright and very much alive. Lovecraft was a shy child he was a retiring, almost reclusive adult much given to haunting the hours of the night. Out of this world subsequently grew much of his fiction in the realm of the 'supernatural'. He lead a sheltered early life, since his health was uncertain, and his semi-individualism enabled him to read omnivorously, as a result of which the sensitive, dreamy child he was early created a strange world of his own, peopled by the creatures of his fancy. » Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a devoted student of the antiques of that city, and perhaps by natural inclination grown from his ancestry, throughout his life a pronounced Anglophile. Whitehead, Frank Belknap Long, Carl Jacobi, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and, surely at the head of the list, the late H.P. But with the establishment in 1923 of the magazine Weird Tales, interest in fantasy received a new impetus, and there came into modest prominence a group of writers including Clark Asthon Smith, the reverend Henry S. ![]() Perhaps it as the lack of any adequate outlet which dampened the ardor of prospective writers before our own time certainly American magazines and book publishers have long been aloofy cool towards prose and poetry of the supernatural or bizarre. It is therefore all the more interesting to note that a new generation of writers in America has turned consistently towards fantasy as a medium of creative expression. Hartley, John Metcafle, Margery Lawrence, and others. Wakefield, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Thomas Burke, L.P. Benson, May Sinclair, Marjoire Bowen, A.E. There is not in America a collection of prose in the genre of the fantastic comparable to that produced in England by such masters as Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M.R. Chambers and a handful of others who wrote in the domain of fantasy are associated primarily with writing that is not macabre. Poe and Bierce almost alone produced a considerable body of writing in the genre Edith Wharton, Henry James, Mary E. Each of us has been brought up by different cultural and religious backgrounds, and therefore developed a vision of the world coloured by the intellectual influences of his own formative years, which in this case can cause different ideas of how such a question should be approached.ĭespite the work of such writers as Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthrone, and Ambrose Bierce, America has no macabre tradition in its literature. The third, and probably most important factor, is that each of us lives in a "religio-cultural world" of his own. The second is that such general review may appear too concise, too superficial, incurring the dual risk of making seemingly simplistic and distorted statements while leaving aside historical or cultural factors that some feel should be included. Despite all the care and thought devoted to its preparation, this paper may still fall short of some readers' expectations for a number of different reasons: The first stems from the enormity and the complexity of the subject, the controversy it engenders and the emotional impact it has on us. We should all be aware, that the subject before us is of unparalleled scope and complexity. ![]()
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