H.P. Lovecraft: A Titan of Terror

he's American literature's Titan of terror the writer who created some of the most iconic names in sci-fi in his 46 short years of life HP Lovecraft was responsible for the alien god Cthulhu the Necronomicon Book of the Dead and the haunted town of Arkham where things always go bump in the night he inspired everyone from Stephen King to jorge luis borges to the writers of batman his work is so penetrated pop-culture that you can even buy plush toys of his creepiest monsters yet HP Lovecraft was a man virtually unknown its lifetime living as a recluse in Rhode Island's he created a sprawling fictional universe that fused traditional horror with cutting-edge science in new and revolutionary ways and then he died before more than a handful of people could read it in the video today we explore how this virtual high meadow became sickness isolation and his own foul prejudices to become the 20th century's master of horror one of the recurring themes in Lovecraft's work is ordinary families hiding dark secrets in their lineage you don't have to look too hard to find the inspiration for this in August the 20th 1890 Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born into the stately ancestral home of one of the oldest families in Providence his mother's side were wealthy aristocrats with rumors of inbreeding in their backgrounds while his father was a traveling salesman already suffering from undiagnosed syphilis before young Howard was even three his dad had a nervous breakdown brought on by his disease and he was confined to a lunatic asylum although the old man lived another five years Lovecraft he'd never see him again despite the obvious setback Lovecraft's mother Sarah tried to give her child a relatively normal life the two moved in with her father the incredibly wealthy gloriously mustachioed Whipple van Buuren Phillips it was here that Lovecraft got his first taste for the uncanny one of Whipple's party tricks was to invent chilling ghost stories just off-the-cuff much to the delight of his grandson still whiffle couldn't make up for the obvious hole in young Lovecraft's life from almost the day that his father collapsed Lovecraft was paralyzed by psychological maladies at the age of six having night terrors of faceless men that were so acute that he would be left trembling for days perhaps it's no surprise that he barely attended school what that Sara was raising a dumb-dumb wibbels house was stacked with books even days he missed school Lovecraft was reading his way through the Arabian Nights through Edgar Allan Poe and even into scientific journals by 1898 Lovecraft was a self-declared atheist scientist producing his own homemade magazines on geology strange as his childhood was it was at least stable but sadly that's not something that would last on March the 27th of 1904 Whipple suffered a massive stroke he died the next day immediately Lovecraft's life it was turned completely upside down it turned out Whipple's finances had been badly mismanaged within days of his death Lovecraft and his mother Sarah were evicted from the house and forced to move into a cramped apartment the shock was so great that Lovecraft by now a boy of fourteen contemplated drowning himself in the Barrington river although it wouldn't come out into the open for a few more years the day Whipple died is effectively the day that Sarah and her son both went mad in 1908 a Lovecraft would suffer a catastrophic breakdown largely related to the tragedy unable to finish high school Bunn able to attend University he locked himself away with his mother cutting off all contact from society over the next five years the pair's relationship it turned toxic if we pulls death had damaged Lovecraft's it had twisted Sarah she became verbally abusive towards her teenage son calling him grotesque and telling him to never leave her side by 1913 the two were living as codependent recluses Lovecraft II never left home before sunset and spent his endless free time doing nothing but reading pulp magazines it's at this time that he seems to have developed both a crippling social anxiety and his abnormal fear of the cold in short love crafts life that was painfully depressing poor lacking in friends and goals he was in danger of simply vanishing from the history books but his life was about to be saved by the unlikeliest of Heroes a romance novelist you've probably never heard a Fred Jackson that had he mentioned his name to HP Lovecraft in 1913 the Rhode Island's recluse would have vomited up blood a shameless trash merchants par excellence Jackson's insipid tales of cliched loved stuff the pages of the Argosy a magazine Lovecraft perhaps somewhat masochistic Lee often Rhett finally fed up with this hag Lovecraft did exactly what any angry weirdo living alone with his mom would do he totally trolled him through 1913 Lovecraft sent a sea of letters to the Argosy attacking Jackson's lack of talent and each time he did it in rhyme it was a bizarre thing to do it was almost childish but it was the thing that actually made Lovecraft's career by 1914 this weird letter writer has reached the attention of Edward F das presidents of the United Amateur Press Association the UA PA intrigues darth read some of Lovecraft's Andy Jackson poems apparently he likes lemons he offered Lovecraft a job and so began one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history perhaps flattered by dass's attention the 24 year old Lovecraft's took to amateur press work like an unspeakable sea demon to water he wrote essays published magazines composed poems he even finally left his mother's stifling embrace and made some friends and good job too because it was those friends who convinced him to try his hand a fiction Lovecraft's had written fiction stories as a child but never really anything serious until the summer of 1917 that was when the now 27 year-old Lovecraft sat down and wrote Dagan the story of a shipwrecked sailor who finds himself trapped in mysterious island filled with the ruins of some hideous civilization Dagan is a short creepy piece that already contains the seeds of Lovecraft's greatest works it's free to read online by the way advances in the homework but the important point is that this is the moment this is the moment when Lovecraft the weird lonely recluse vanished and Lovecraft the weird lonely writer arrived not that this transition came without tragedy in 19:19 Lovecraft's mother Sarah had a total breakdown confined to the same lunatic asylum Osmond iDEN she spent two more years raving before finally dying herself in May of 1921 suddenly orphaned still too strange to fend for himself Lovecraft was taken in by a snobbish ance Lillian D Clarke and Annie E Phillips gam well this would not be a happy relationship but before we dive into that it's time we introduced the last significant character in the life of HP Lovecraft Sonya haft Greene a Russian Jew seven years Lovecraft senior Sonya was a face known on the amateur press scene independently wealthy from her successful hat store she bankrolled several low-budget magazine barely two weeks after Sarah's death Sonya was visiting au APA convention in Boston when she was introduced to the newly orphaned Lovecraft somehow the two hit it off what followed wasn't exactly a Fred Jackson star romance Lovecraft was so disinterested in sex that Sonya had to cajole him into making love by giving him text books on romance to study perhaps unsurprisingly Pete would later claim Lovecraft was a virgin when they met still the two really did like one another on March the 3rd 1924 they Wed in a secret ceremony only informing Lovecraft's disapproving arms by letter not long after Lovecraft left Rhode Island's and moved in with Sonya in New York it was spring 1924 and life was good Lovecraft was having his first stories professionally published in Weird Tales and Sonja's hat business was booming things they were finally getting on track [Music] except of course he couldn't last Sonia was unwell by the end of 1924 her illness was eating up so much of her time that the hat shop had gone bust Lovecraft had meanwhile bungled his one shot at a stable income by turning down the opportunity to add a rival pulp magazine to weird tales come Christmas of 1924 the two were broke on January the 1st 1925 Sonia moved alone to Cleveland to take up a job left behind in New York Lovecraft rented a tiny apartment in Brooklyn's notorious Red Hook it was a mistake that would haunt him for the rest of his life Lovecraft hated rhetoric he absolutely hated it surrounded by immigrants suddenly alone and broke again he descended into a twisted bitterness that found its expression in the worst kind of racism yes it's time for us to talk about the demonic elder God in the room Lovecraft was a bounding racist the sort of person it's hard to believe exists outside of daily storm a message wards in 1912 for example aged 22 had written a poem referring to black people as beasts and semi human figures he was also a raging anti-semite he once wrote of New York City the population is a mongrel herd with repulsive mongoloid Jews in the visible majority and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every goddamn bastard in sight yikes lest we be accused of unfair treatment we should note here that Lovecraft's racism was more complex than it at first appears you probably remember from t 1 minutes ago that his wife Sonya was herself Jewish well she wasn't the only Jewish friend that Lovecraft hat tablet magazine notes that the pulp writer Robert Bloch who would later penned the novel Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is based on was a friend of Lovecraft's and so is the poet Samuel Loveman Lovecraft then was a man who was openly racist but in the abstract sense faced with people he personally liked he weren't white Protestants Lovecraft seemed to have no problems discarding his racial beliefs not that there were many people Lovecraft liked in Red Hook though as 1925 dragged on the reclusive writers feelings towards foreigners turned into something close to horror the dread he felt surrounded by a sea of non-white faces turned into a genuine phobia it's since been argued that this phobia influenced Lovecraft's work itself with his tales of nameless forces and unknowable aliens it's not too much of a stretch to think that Lovecraft was simply channeling his inner feelings towards New York's multicultural population if that is the case well at least we can say that something good came of his very poisonous thoughts by early 1926 Lovecraft had had enough he wrote to his aunts Lillian and Annie begging them for help the two agreed to engineer his return to Providence but at a price Sonya would not move to Rhode Island and she would never see her husband again exhausted desperate to get away from the city he hated so much Lovecraft agreed although he still claimed to love Sonia he moved back to Providence on April the 17th 1926 and he would never see his wife again in summer 1926 the hideous creature rose out of the waters of the South Pacific a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline but with an octopus like head whose face was a mass of feelers a scaly rubbery looking body prodigious claws on the hind and fore feet and long barrow wings behind the monster towered not just over all who saw it but over horror fiction itself it's name was Cthulhu and it was to become the most importance of all of Lovecraft's creations the star of a short story that Call of Cthulhu Cthulhu was Lovecraft's first creation after returning Providence an elder God biding his time in the depths of the sea waiting with a moment humanity will awaken him and destroy the world Cthulhu has gripped our imaginations ever since there's even a region on Pluto named after him yes at the moments he first raised his unspeakable head from the waves Cthulhu seemed destined for obscurity newly arrived back from New York Lovecraft had little hope for his latest monster beyond a small paycheck and some fleeting recognition luckily though his friends they had other ideas Ramar we talked about how Lovecraft finally made some real friends after joining the UAP a way back in 1914 well over the years that evolved into quite the little circle of pen pals among the number were a robot block of psycho Fame Robert E Howard the creator of Conan the Barbarian and writer August Derleth who's about to become really really important in about five minutes when these guys read Cthulhu they went absolutely nuts Cthulhu it was something new it encouraged everyone in Lovecraft circle to start writing their own tales set in the same universe over the next decade the group would build up something called the Cthulhu Mythos it's the reason we still remember the character of Cthulhu today at the same time as this mythos was growing Lovecraft went through his most productive streak as a writer something about moving back to Rhode Island has energized him in a handful of years he wrote some of his greatest hits the color out of space the case of Charles Dexter Ward's the shadow over Innsmouth and the mountains of madness if you're not a Lovecraft fan just know that this is like the Beatles knocking out Sergeant Pepper the white album Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road one after the other it was a master working at his peak conjuring Vista's of cyclopean alien cities and eldritch horizon-- like anything readers had ever experienced before love graph may have been living in semi poverty with two domineering aunts and no access to the woman he loved but it was clearly doing wonders for his productivity even the bruising Wall Street Crash of 1929 failed to dent his newfound enthusiasm as the nineteen thirties got underway he was scraping together enough funds to take long jaunts along the coast of his beloved New England but if there's one thing we've learned about Lovecraft's life so far it's that all good things must come to a terrible end and soon enough they did in 1932 Lovecraft's aunt Lillian Clarke died despite her overbearing personality Lovecraft was devastated he and his surviving Arne's Annie were forced to move into a tiny apartment it was the beginning of a long slide into grinding poverty Lovecraft may have been writing his greatest work at this point but his greatest work it was long complex stuff and it had no mass appeal what he and then he needed were short punchy tales that he could sell regularly not something like the Antarctic horror of at the mountains of madness which took five years to find a buyer the Lovecraft had too much integrity or perhaps too much stupidity to lower his standards he only took on ghost writing work in order to survive way back in 1924 it ghost written herself a Harry Houdini and the two had become friends so maybe this would be just as rewarding sadly it was not to be the ghost writing of Lovecraft's final years took up all of his time and left him drained and as poor as it ever been he took to eating tins of expired food in order to survive and that was only when he could afford to eat at all perhaps one of the positive achievements Lovecraft made in these gloomy years was to keep up his letter-writing from the days of his trolley nurses to the Argosy Lovecraft had composed letters with a commitment rarely seen before or since it's estimated he sent a hundred thousand letters in his lifetime second only to the great French philosopher Voltaire by spring 1936 Lovecraft had almost given up on his fiction his only story since 90 30:3 had been the shadow out of time now considered a late classic ins the creepy that short hunter of the dark so why this sudden lack of interest in alien worlds well it may have been because Lovecraft had found something else to write about in the cold New England winter of 1935 to 1936 Lovecraft had begun documenting an illness that he was suffering from that he called the grip this scrip was actually cancer as 1936 wore on it ate away at his intestines until his insides were riddled with tumors like the recluse II was Lovecraft refused to see a doctor that summer more bad news came Robert E Howard the Conan writer and friend of Lovecraft committed suicide by shooting himself in the head the death of his pen pal sent Lovecraft spiraling into a depression from which he never fully recovered by spring 1937 it was all too clear that something was deeply wrong Lovecraft had written nothing but four poems in over a year he was in constant agony and consumed by black thoughts often you had said alone at night in the cold and gloomy apartments haunting the darkened room like one of his own creations on March the 10th 1937 the pain it finally became too much Lovecraft checked himself into the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital but by now the cancer had gone far too beyond what any treatment could take care of five days later on March the 15th 1937 HP Lovecraft passed away in his last moments it's possible he wondered what would become of his work after he died if he did we can only assume that he thought his writings scattered across cheap pulp magazines would soon be forgotten but he had encountered on August Derleth [Music] rather how we mentioned that August Derleth was one of Lovecraft's writer friends and was going to be really really important to this story at some point well this is that point after Lovecraft died delyth decided to give the old master the literary send-off that he deserved in August of 1939 Derleth founded Arkham house publishers specifically to put out hardback editions of Lovecraft stories The Outsider and others has appeared the same year and was resoundingly not a success its advance orders came to a mere 150 copies when one wound up at the New Yorkers officers they gave it a dreadful review but here's the thing about Derleth he may have been a hack writer who utterly failed to grasp what Lovecraft was trying to do with his fiction but he was a loyal friend and he was also a friend who just happened to have very deep pockets over the next few years Derleth kept Arkham House afloat putting out volume after volume of Lovecraft's tales he even had them translated into foreign languages this turned out to be an excellent move over in post-war France the French translations of Lovecraft's works became hugely popular it helped that Paris intellectuals already considered Edgar Allan Poe literary Titan and Lovecraft was clearly Poe's 20th century's successor by the 1960s Lovecraft was so popular abroad that it made financial sense for Arkin house to re-release his story stateside the timing simply couldn't have been better Lovecraft reappeared on the scene just as a new wave of films was making horror popular again Rosemary's Baby Night of the Living Dead not to mention the first US release of Britain's Hammer horror films sparked a surge of interest in weird fiction legions of people who'd never read horror or sci-fi flocked to Lovecraft by the 1970s the gentleman from Providence a serious fan base what followed was a dizzying embrace of an author who'd only ever written for part magazines in 1974 Batman's writers borrowed the idea of Arkham Asylum from Lovecraft in 1977 super fans Stephen King exploded onto the literary scene with Cary and spent the rest of his career encouraging others to read Lovecraft that same year a group of American fans cobbled together enough cash to replace Lovecraft small tombstone with a gigantic stately one bearing the legend I Providence the cult of Lovecraft's like the cults that gather around the great Cthulhu and his stories could no longer be ignored in the years since that myth of Lovecraft has only grown today's stories have entered the Canon of American fiction both Penguin Classics and library of America of released volumes people as diverse as Neil Gaiman Alan Moore and Guillermo de Toro have been influenced by him he's arguably the best-known horror writer whose name isn't anger Allan Poe but perhaps the best way to explain the enduring appeal of HP Lovecraft is through the words of Erica Henderson the Marvel artists responsible for Squirrel Girl speaking to the Guardian in 2013 she said Lovecraft made a world where humans are alone floating on a rack in a terrifying larger universe that we cannot possibly comprehend because our time in it has been so short and we are so insignificant compared to the horrors from the Cthulhu Mythos so much of modern horror is based on that idea we wouldn't have Ghostbusters who went for Lovecraft and that's the best argument that I can think of for his work he may have been a weirdo he may have held despicable beliefs but Lovecraft was an artist who would come to influence the very way that we think about horror from his twisted mind he brought us nightmares we'd never even dreamed of before nightmares that still haunt us to this very day so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do give us a thumbs up below and don't forget to subscribe also if you're looking for something else I got another channel called top 10s we do top 10 lists we've got authors on there as well as lots of other people and just interesting fact so go check that out you'll find a link to it below as well as on the screen and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Biographics

Views: 693,818

Rating: 4.9152832 out of 5

Keywords: h.p. lovecraft, lovecraft, hp lovecraft, h. p. lovecraft (author), h p lovecraft, lovecraft mythos, howard phillips lovecraft, lovecraft audiobook, h.p. lovecraft monsters, h.p. lovecraft documentary, the stories of h.p. lovecraft, h.p. lovecraft - american writer, h. p. lovecraft, cthulhu, h.p lovecraft, horror, h. p. lovecraft (writer), h. p. lovecraft (lyricist), lovecraft's, hp lovecraft horror

Id: EIdf3DHLjMQ

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/joseph-curwen]

Don't know if this has been posted before, but I'd never saw it and found it very interesting.

[u/insultsonpointmybro]

Good find. Quality video 👍