2022-12-02: Lovecraft's Racism
What a shame!
What a shame!
It really is such a shame that HP Lovecraft never overcame his horrible racism until the very end of his life. It really was quite horrible, too, even by the standards of his time. Sure, the man expressed a deep regret for his bigoted sentiments and feelings at the end of his life, but that didn't magically erase all the racism embedded into his fiction. He was an incredible writer when he wasn't going out of his way to paint people of colour, Jews, and the wrong kinds of Europeans as barbaric madmen… Which, sadly, was more often than one would expect.
In this letter, Howard expressed a feeling of deep self loathing at his past self for his own naive, uninformed bigotry, at his asinine reactionary beliefs that seeped into his writing. Too little, too late, it makes me sad to say.