An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

World War I enters fleetingly but provocatively into HPL’s fiction. “Dagon” (1917) was written a few months after American entry into the war and is set in the war-torn Pacific. “The Temple” (1920) purports to be the account of a German commander of a U-boat. The fifth segment of “Herbert West —Reanimator” (1921–22) is set in Flanders, as West and the narrator are, in 1915, among “the many Americans to precede the [U.S.] government itself into the gigantic struggle.” Thurber, the narrator of “Pickman’s Model” (1926), adduces his war experience as testimony to his physical and mental toughness; an electrical repairman in “Cool Air” (1926) is terrified at the sight of Dr. Muñoz, even though he “had been through the terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.” In “The Silver Key” (1926) Randolph Carter is said to have “served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France.” Because he has doubled back upon his own time-line, Carter, in 1897, pales at the mention of the French town of Belloyen-Santerre, where he was almost mortally wounded in 1916. (The town is where the poet Alan Seeger was killed.) Most intriguingly, Peaslee in “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35), after being a captive mind of the Great Race and learning the secrets of the universe both past and future, finds that “The war gave me strange impressions of rememberingsome of its far-off consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look backupon it in the light of future information.”

Wright, Farnsworth (1888–1940),

editor of WT. Wright took editorship of the magazine in early 1924, replacing Edwin Baird. He had served in World War I and was music critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner,continuing in this capacity for a time even while editing WT. By early 1921 he had contracted Parkinson’s disease, and by around 1930 he was incapable of signing his letters; ultimately it would prove fatal. Wright was compelled to balance the interests of the magazine’s readers (most of whom were relatively unsophisticated and illeducated) with the search for quality; HPL tended to feel that he was unduly influenced by the readers who wrote to the magazine’s letter column, “The Ey

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rie.” Wright published a vast amount of rubbish in WTbut managed to keep WTafloat through the Depression, when many other pulp magazines (notably the rival Strange Tales[1931–33]) failed. Wright did not get off on the right foot with HPL by rejecting “The Shunned House” when it was submitted to him in 1925; it was HPL’s first rejection by the magazine, as Edwin Baird previously had accepted everything HPL had submitted. Thereafter Wright tended to accept HPL’s more conventional tales and to reject his more aesthetically challenging ones. He was also greatly concerned about censorship: the May–June–July 1924 issue had almost been banned in Indiana because of the gruesomeness of the HPL–Eddy story “The Loved Dead,” and Wright (according to HPL) was in terror of a repeat of such an incident; accordingly, he rejected HPL’s “In the Vault” and “Cool Air” on the grounds that they were too grisly. Wright also rejected several of HPL’s Dunsanian fantasies. Wright appeared to wish HPL to be more explicit in the matter of the causes of his supernatural phenomena; HPL felt that this repeated plea had a deleterious effect on his later work by making it too obvious and explanatory.

In late 1926 Wright proposed a collection of HPL’s stories, to be part of a series of books issued by WT. In a long letter to Wright (December 22, 1927; AHT), HPL outlined a proposed table of contents for the book (which he wished to call The Outsider and Other Storiesbecause “I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness—of dim, shadowy non-terrestrialhints—to be the characteristic feature of my writing”): the “ indispensablenucleus” would be “The Outsider,” “Arthur Jermyn,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Picture in the House,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” “Dagon,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and “The Cats of Ulthar”; to be augmented by one of the following —“The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” or “The Colour out of Space.” But the Popular Fiction Publishing Company’s first book, The Moon Terrorby A.G.Birch and others, sold so poorly that plans to issue further volumes were dropped.