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To the three wonderful women in my life: my mother, Ruth M. Anderson; my sister, Elaine Clark; and my wife, Lynn Llorye Anderson.
The story of how H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) emerged from being a mere “pulp hack” to being on the cusp of literary and academic respectability is a “weird tale” as bizarre as anything he ever wrote. In his declining years he appears to have become grimly resigned to the realization that his tales would find a merited oblivion in the already crumbling pages of the pulp magazines in which they had appeared. The dilemma facing Lovecraft was that his work was out of step both with the dominant social realism of the mainstream magazines as well as the stilted and mechanical formulas of the pulps. His best work was rejected by pulp editors who could not pigeonhole it in within their narrow parameters, but there was not the slightest chance that it could find a home in the “slick” magazines of the day. Accordingly, Lovecraft became increasingly discouraged with the development of his own career; unusually, and inexplicably, sensitive to rejection, he came to conclude toward the end of his life that the rejection by Weird Tales of At the Mountains of Madness (and, perhaps more relevantly, the unfavorable response it received from some of his closest colleagues) “did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career” (SL V 224). It is scarcely to be wondered that Lovecraft’s half-dozen attempts to negotiate book deals with major publishers all came to naught, marred by his inexperience in literary marketing, his excessive humility, and his incomprehensible refusal to offer a perfectly good short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for publication.
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“He,” and “In the Vault.”
1926 Returns to Providence at 10 Barnes St.
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