H.P. Lovecraft's Racism: The Dark Side of the Man Who Invented Cthulhu
In 2011, the Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. It was one of the biggest honours in her field. The trophy was a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern cosmic horror, sculpted by the cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Not long afterwards, she came across some of the things Lovecraft had written about Black people.
She wrote about her conflicted feelings on her blog: what did it mean for a Black writer to be handed an award in the likeness of a man who held people like her in contempt? That question started a debate that eventually saw the bust retired and forced the horror world to look hard at one of its founding fathers.
Lovecraft gave us Cthulhu, the Necronomicon and a whole universe of tentacled horrors that still dominates films, games and fiction. He was also, by any measure, a deeply committed racist. And the more closely you read his work, the harder it is to argue that the two things can be kept apart.
Quick Answers
● Was H.P. Lovecraft racist? Yes. His letters are full of racist and antisemitic views, and he believed in a racial hierarchy with white Anglo-Saxons at the top.
● Which Lovecraft stories are racist? The most obvious examples include The Horror at Red Hook, Herbert West: Reanimator, Medusa's Coil, Arthur Jermyn, The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Call of Cthulhu.
● Was Lovecraft just a man of his time? That's the traditional defence, but many critics argue his views were extreme even for the 1920s and 30s, and that racial fear sits at the core of his horror.
● Why was the World Fantasy Award changed? After complaints from writers of colour, the organisers retired the Lovecraft bust trophy in 2015.
● Where is Lovecraft buried? Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, under a headstone paid for by fans in 1977 that reads I AM PROVIDENCE.
● Did Lovecraft change his views? His politics moved left in the 1930s, but there's little evidence his racial views changed much before his death in 1937.
Who Was H.P. Lovecraft?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890 and died there, poor and largely unknown, in 1937. He never finished high school, never had a proper career and lived most of his life with elderly relatives, writing strange stories for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and an astonishing number of letters, often thousands of words long, to a network of friends and fellow writers.
His fame came almost entirely after his death. Today his influence is everywhere, from Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro to video games and heavy metal albums. The basic idea of his cosmic horror, that humanity is a tiny, meaningless speck in a vast and hostile universe, has shaped the genre for a century.
His letters are where his racial views are laid out most plainly. Brown University Library, which holds the biggest Lovecraft archive in the world, has put together an online exhibition, The Racial Imaginaries of H.P. Lovecraft, that traces those views in detail.
Where Lovecraft's Racism Came From
Lovecraft was obsessed with his own ancestry. He went on what he called ancestral pilgrimages around New England, sketching his forebears' gravestones and romanticising colonial America as a lost golden age. Brown's exhibition shows how he believed that race and culture were tied together in separate streams that must never mix, and that mixing them could only mean contamination. He was even anxious about the Celtic branches of his own family tree, much preferring what he saw as his Teutonic roots.
He also absorbed the so-called scientific racism of his era. As Motif magazine's look at his racism in context points out, Lovecraft was heavily influenced by eugenics and pseudo-scientific race theory, and he grew up in an America that turned those ideas into law. The Immigration Act of 1924 slashed immigration from Italy and Eastern Europe by more than 90%, and the US was also forcing people out: a few years later, hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent were pushed out in the Mexican Repatriation.
But Motif also notes that by the 1930s, the scientific case for racism had largely collapsed, and Lovecraft knew it. In 1931 he admitted: "No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic." He carried on believing it anyway.
The New York Years
The period that brought out the worst in Lovecraft was the two years he spent in New York. In March 1924 he surprised everyone by marrying Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant who ran her own millinery business. According to the Gotham Center for New York City History, the marriage fell apart almost as quickly as their finances. Sonia's business collapsed, Lovecraft couldn't find work and by the end of the year she'd moved to Cincinnati for a job, leaving him alone in a single room in Brooklyn Heights, living on bread, cheese and tinned beans. In May 1925, burglars stole most of his clothes.
As his life went downhill, his letters home got uglier. He ranted about immigrants, Jews and Black New Yorkers, and according to the Gotham Center, he later explained that The Horror at Red Hook was inspired by the "herds of evil-looking foreigners" he saw around him. The story, written in 1925, treats the multi-ethnic Brooklyn neighbourhood itself as a source of evil, with its mix of immigrant communities presented as a sign of decay.
Sonia later wrote a memoir about their marriage, and some of the details are almost unbelievable. According to Tablet magazine, Lovecraft assured his Jewish wife that she was no longer part of the immigrant hordes now that she was a Lovecraft, and asked that Aryans should make up the majority at any gathering they hosted. He fled back to Providence in April 1926, and they divorced a few years later.
The contradictions are part of what makes Lovecraft so odd. Despite his antisemitism, he married a Jewish woman, stayed close friends with the Jewish poet Samuel Loveman and mentored a teenage Robert Bloch, the future author of Psycho. He even ghostwrote a story for the escapologist Harry Houdini, the son of a rabbi.
What Happened to Sonia?
Sonia comes out of this story far better than her husband. She'd supported him financially through much of their marriage, and she never stopped writing, publishing and working. She eventually moved to California, and in 1936 she married a doctor, Nathaniel Davis.
There was a catch nobody told her about. Sonia had started divorce proceedings in 1929, but according to the Lovecraft encyclopedia's entry on her, Lovecraft never signed the final papers, so technically they were never divorced. And she didn't even hear that he'd died until 1945, eight years after the event. Her memories of him were published in the Providence Sunday Journal in 1948 and later as a book, The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft. She died in 1972.
Racism in Lovecraft's Stories
It would be easier if Lovecraft had kept his views to his letters. He didn't.
The Horror at Red Hook (1925). Probably the most openly bigoted of his stories, in which a detective uncovers a devil-worshipping cult among the immigrants of Brooklyn. Even after the cult is destroyed, the story suggests the neighbourhood's evil can never be cleaned away.
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920). A man researching his family tree discovers that one of his ancestors was a white ape from Africa, and is so horrified that he sets himself on fire. Brown's exhibition places it in a category the scholar Mitch Frye calls genotypic horror, where the monster is hidden inside your own bloodline.
The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931). Often called his best story, it's about a New England town whose people have been interbreeding with fish-like creatures called the Deep Ones. The narrator slowly realises he's one of them. It's hard to read it now and not see Lovecraft's terror of mixed ancestry turned into fiction. As the New Republic notes, the story describes the federal government raiding the town and holding its people in concentration camps, presented as a perfectly reasonable response.
The Call of Cthulhu (1928). His most famous story. The worshippers of Cthulhu, the ones who keep the evil alive, are almost all non-white: mixed-race sailors, people from the Caribbean, Inuit and others, set against the white scholars trying to uncover the truth.
The Rats in the Walls (1924). The narrator's beloved black cat has a name that's an unrepeatable racial slur. According to the Deep Cuts blog's detailed look at the story, Lovecraft took the name from his own childhood cat, which appears in family letters from 1895. Some later reprints changed it, and one 1956 magazine edition renamed the cat Black Tom.
Herbert West: Reanimator (1922). Better known today through the cult 1985 film Re-Animator, this early serial includes a Black boxer whom Lovecraft describes in openly animalistic terms. The critic behind the Taskerland blog's essay on the story calls it some of the most horrifically racist prose Lovecraft ever produced and argues it destroys the idea that he was simply reflecting his era.
Medusa's Coil (1930). Lovecraft ghostwrote many stories for paying clients, and this one, credited to Zealia Bishop, is often called his most bigoted. It was finished in August 1930 and published in Weird Tales in 1939, after his death. Its final twist, delivered as the ultimate horror, is that the beautiful and sinister Marceline secretly has Black ancestry. As Taskerland's essay on the story notes, her supernatural menace is bound up with racialised descriptions of her body and hair.
Then there's the matter of a vile 1912 poem whose title includes the same slur. It's often quoted as proof of Lovecraft's racism, but Motif points out that its authorship is uncertain: it survives in only one copy and isn't mentioned anywhere in his notes or letters. His letters alone make that argument well enough without it.
Lovecraft on Hitler
If any single part of Lovecraft's record shocks modern fans, it's his letters from 1933. In a long exchange with a young correspondent, J. Vernon Shea, he discussed Nazi Germany at length.
He criticised Nazi race science as crude, but he admired Hitler himself, calling him sincere and well-meaning. In one letter he wrote, as Brown's exhibition records: "By god, I like the boy!" The same letters show that his hatred of Black people was the most extreme of all his prejudices. He believed they could never be integrated into white society.
It's worth remembering that this was 1933, before the worst of the Nazi regime was clear to the world. But it's also not a letter anyone can easily explain away.
Arguing With Conan's Creator
Some of the most revealing letters Lovecraft ever wrote went to Robert E. Howard, the Texan pulp writer who created Conan the Barbarian. Between 1930 and 1936 they exchanged letters that fill more than 900 printed pages, according to Goodman Games' account of the correspondence, and much of it was a running argument about civilisation versus barbarism.
Lovecraft championed order, tradition and a strong, cultured state, and his side of the debate leaned on the idea that some so-called primitive peoples were better suited to barbarism than civilisation. Howard, a frontier romantic, was sceptical of the whole idea that his own society was the pinnacle of human achievement. "Where does barbarism leave off and civilization begin?" he asked. It's an exchange that helped shape the Conan stories and the whole sword and sorcery genre. It ended when Howard took his own life in 1936, a loss that hit Lovecraft hard less than a year before his own death.
Did Lovecraft Ever Change?
His defenders often argue that Lovecraft mellowed in his final years, and in some ways he did. The Great Depression pushed his economics sharply to the left. He'd started out as a staunch conservative who liked to joke about being a monarchist, and by the mid-1930s he was a New Deal Democrat who supported Franklin Roosevelt and was scathing about Republicans in his letters, as this study of his political transition shows.
But the same account concludes that his views on race and civilisation stayed largely traditional right to the end. Late in life he could still look back on his New York year with some fondness, but the Gotham Center notes that he kept seeing the city as a warning of what immigration could do to Providence. He died of cancer in March 1937, aged 46.
A Man of His Time?
The biggest argument among Lovecraft fans is whether his racism is just part of the era he lived in or something central to his work.
The leading Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi, has long argued that it was a product of his time and not really essential to his fiction. Others strongly disagree. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in a book on Lovecraft, argued that he followed racism all the way down to its root, which was fear. Writing in the New Republic, Siddhartha Deb went further, arguing that Lovecraft's racism was neither accidental nor simply borrowed from the spirit of the age, but ran right through his fiction.
There's a strong case for that view. Lovecraft's horror is built on the fear of contamination: of blood, of family trees, of cities, of civilisation itself. The monsters come from outside, or from somewhere hidden in your ancestry, and they're coming to drag you down. Brown's exhibition ends on the same note, arguing that works of culture like Lovecraft's reveal the political subconscious of the society that produced them.
Horror has always had its roots in the fears of its age. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein grew out of anxieties about science and creation, as we explored in our look at the night gothic horror was born. Lovecraft's fears were racial, and he put them on the page.
I Am Providence: Lovecraft's Hometown Today
Lovecraft is buried in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, in the Phillips family plot. His own small headstone carries the words I AM PROVIDENCE, taken from one of his letters. It wasn't there originally: Atlas Obscura notes that fans paid for it in 1977, and visitors still leave offerings there.
Since 2013, the city has hosted NecronomiCon Providence, a festival of Lovecraft and weird fiction. It's had to work out how to celebrate a writer many of its attendees find repugnant. A recap of the 2022 event, which drew around 1,400 people, described a diverse, welcoming crowd that deliberately pushes back against the ugliest parts of his legacy, while still visiting his house, his grave and the places that inspired his stories.
Cthulhu at the Games Table
For a lot of people, the first taste of Lovecraft isn't a book at all. It's a game. Chaosium's tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu has been around since 1981, and it's spawned board games, card games and video games that reach far more people than the stories ever did.
That's brought its own reckoning. The standout example is Harlem Unbound by Chris Spivey, a setting for Call of Cthulhu that puts Black characters in 1920s Harlem at the centre of the action and confronts the racism of the era head-on, including Lovecraft's own. It was originally self-published through Spivey's company Darker Hue Studios, won three ENnie Awards and was then taken on by Chaosium itself for a second edition. According to Tabletop Gaming, the book sets out to reverse the sidelined and prejudiced portrayal of minorities in horror fiction like Lovecraft's.
The World Fantasy Award Row
The debate came to a head over that trophy. After Okorafor's blog post, other writers spoke up. China Miéville, who'd won the award himself, said he framed his win as writing behind Lovecraft's back. In 2014, the writer Daniel José Older started a petition calling for the bust to be replaced with one of the Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler.
On 8 November 2015, the World Fantasy Convention announced that the Lovecraft bust would be retired after 40 years, according to The Mary Sue. The reaction was furious in some quarters. S.T. Joshi said he'd never attend another World Fantasy Convention and would refuse any future award, calling the decision, as Black Gate reported, "a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness."
A year-long public competition followed, and in 2017 a new statuette by the sculptor Vincent Villafranca was unveiled, designed, as Locus reported, to reflect the whole breadth of fantasy rather than any one writer.
Lovecraft Reclaimed
The most interesting response to Lovecraft's racism hasn't come from banning him but from writers talking back to him.
In 2016, Victor LaValle published The Ballad of Black Tom, which retells The Horror at Red Hook from the point of view of a Black musician in 1920s Harlem. LaValle had discovered Lovecraft at about ten and realised how racist he was a few years later. He's described his book, according to Barnes and Noble's interview with him and Matt Ruff, as "arguing with masterpieces."
The same year, Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country followed a Black family in 1950s America who publish a Safe Negro Travel Guide, clearly inspired by the real Green Book, and discover that Jim Crow America is every bit as terrifying as any tentacled god. HBO turned it into a series in 2020, created by Misha Green, and it earned 18 Emmy nominations before being cancelled in 2021, according to Entertainment Tonight.
Perhaps the most striking reclamation of all is Ruthanna Emrys's novel Winter Tide, published in 2017. It takes The Shadow over Innsmouth and turns it inside out. The heroine, Aphra Marsh, is one of the Deep Ones, a survivor of the government camps where Innsmouth's people were sent after the raid Lovecraft describes. Her adoptive family are Japanese Americans who survived the real internment camps of the Second World War.
Emrys has said she's drawn to Lovecraft's monsters precisely because they stand in for the people he hated. As she told Fantasy-Faction, "hate and fear of other humans are deeply embedded in his work," yet he often seems more intrigued by his monsters than his bigotry should allow. That's the gap she writes into.
That's perhaps the best way to deal with Lovecraft. Pretending he wasn't racist doesn't work, and nor does pretending his influence doesn't exist. But a new generation of writers has taken his monsters and turned them back on the fears he built them from. There's a certain justice in that. The man who was terrified of the outsider has become the one being written about.
