Conflicting Visions: H. P. Lovecraft and the Genesis of the Modern Weird Tale

<p dir="ltr">The fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) continues to divide literary critics, some of whom perceive him as a typical pulp writer while others argue that his work appeared in pulp magazines like <i>Weird Tales</i> only because there were no other markets available for it during his lifetime. Lovecraft himself complicates this discussion, as he claims in his correspondence that the pulps, which he personally despised on account of their sophomoric conventions and their heavy-handed editors, influenced him subconsciously and corrupted his fiction. I attempt to resolve this debate by examining Lovecraft’s work in its original context, examining it alongside works published in <i>Weird Tales</i> magazine, where most of his published fiction appeared, while reconstructing the history of that magazine and his involvement with it. I argue that Lovecraft and <i>Weird Tales</i> shaped each other, far more so than most Lovecraft scholars have acknowledged. Lovecraft reworked, and improved, material that he read in the pulps, which provided him with a warehouse of ideas and themes. He, in exchange, offered <i>Weird Tales</i> an exciting new vision of the weird tale, the short story of supernatural horror, which combined Gothic terror with the cosmic outlook of twentieth-century science fiction. The novelty of Lovecraft’s approach, which owes much to the science fiction published in <i>Weird Tales</i>, would win over the magazine’s readers and, eventually, the resistance of its longtime editor, Farnsworth Wright, even though Lovecraft himself lacked confidence in the results.</p>