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Selected Letters by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Requirements: PDF Reader, vol II-189 MB, vol III-138 MB, vol IV 149 MB
Overview: Despite Lovecraft's light letter-writing in youth, in later life his correspondence was so voluminous that it has been estimated that he may have written around 30,000 letters to various correspondents, a figure which places him second only to Voltaire as an epistolarian. Lovecraft's later correspondence is primarily to fellow weird fiction writers, rather than to the amateur journalist friends of his earlier years. Lovecraft clearly states that his contact to numerous different people through letter-writing was one of the main factors in broadening his view of the world: "I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge." Today there are five publishing houses that have released letters from Lovecraft, most prominently Arkham House with its five-volume edition Selected Letters.
**These books are hand scanned.

Genre: Fantasy, Horror.



Selected Letters II
(1925-1929)
By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei

The second volume of Lovecraft’s letters covers his last year of married life and residence in New York, his separation from his wife
and return to his native Providence, and the beginnings of his antiquarian explorations. It includes as well detailed accounts of the
origins and development of his long critique, Supernatural Horror in Literature, his fantastic novel, The Dream Quest of Unknown
Kadath, his macabre tales, The Horror at Red Hook, In the Vault, The Call of Cthulhu, and others. Among literary matters of special
interest are his ghost-writing for Houdinin, his solution of the puzzle concerning the Voss-de-Castro-Bierce authorship of The Monk
and The Hangman’s Daughter, and his correspondence with such other noted fantasistes as Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Vincent
Starrett, Donald Wandrei, and August Derleth. Not only are his daily life and events recorded, his views of post-war America of the 1920s,
but the full range of his mind and imagination are illustrated in his concept of the cosmos, while his vivid narratives of horror-dreams rank
among the most remarkable in the literature of nightmares. Many gems are imbedded in these pages – essays in full or in miniature, serious or
leavened with satiric humor, on such diverse topics as Salem, cats, liquor, smoking, superstition, sex, heraldry, genealogy, machine civilization,
modern art, intellectuals, the beauty of New England, and countless more. A mechanistic materialist in his philosophy, a rationalist, a skeptic,
a humanist and, above all, a truth-seeker always, Lovecraft proved himself an original thinker and a bold philosopher. Few letter-writers have
rivalled him in depth, variety, insight, and the inquiring challenge that combine accurate scholarship with unlimited imagination, in prose that
often scales the heights of poetic and prophetic vision.

Selected Letters III
(1929-1931)
By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei

Back at the Barnes Street house in his native Providence, H.P. Lovecraft lived comfortably with his aunts, Mrs. F.C. Clark and Mrs. A.E. Phillips
Gamwell, his mother’s sisters, during the period of his life covered by the letters in this third volume – July, 1929 through 1931. Here he steadily
improved as a writer of the macabre, enlarging his literary horizons, while at the same time, paradoxically, he began to doubt himself with an unhappy
effect on his creative activity. Yet this was the period of some of his most notable tales – The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Whisperer
in Darkness, and At the Mountains of Madness – as well as of his best poems, the The Fungi from Yuggoth, the crystallization of ideas or themes he
hoped to develop later in fiction. It was also a time of many difficulties with editors of the few magazines regularly publishing tales of the macabre.
His revision work included more and more tales that were eventually to be looked upon as his own, such as The Curse of Yig and The Mound, and his
increasing correspondence delineates his interest in manuscripts that merged into the range of his own creative domain. His letters – the windows to
the world for him – were sometimes voluminous indeed; in this volume a letter to Woodburn Harris, and another to Frank Belknap Long, are the longest
ever written, each setting down significant facts of his background and genealogy, as well as of his life as writer and man. In these letters Lovecraft
sets forth how inexpensively he lived, his views on marriage as a doomed social institution, on the inevitable decline of art and literature, and explored
many other subjects with an easy erudition unknown to any of his correspondents – Long, James F. Morton, Maurice W. Moe, Clark Ashton Smith, Elizabeth
Toldridge, August Derleth and such newcomers as Robert E. Howard, Harris, and J. Vernon Shea. He defined himself repeatedly as a “truth-seeker,” a
rational materialist in his philosophy, an “indifferentist” in his view of human history, and a “cosmicist” in his overall conception of the known,
observable universe. The depth and variety of his insight have seldom been equalled by the letter-writers of his time.

Selected Letters IV
(1932-1934)
By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by August Derleth and James Turner

During the period covered by this fourth volume of letters, Howard Phillips Lovecraft resided quietly in Providence, Rhode Island amidst a society
then languishing under the ravages wrought by the great depression. At the beginning of this period, in January 1932, Lovecraft had been living
frugally in a boarding house at 10 Barnes Street with his elder aunt, Lillian Clark, but after Mrs. Clark’s demise he was impelled under the pressure
of poverty to combine households the following year with his other aunt, Mrs. Annie E. Phillips Gamwell. Not a great deal had remained of the old
family of Whipple Phillips, but the two surviving members and their residual possessions were now comfortably accommodated on the upper floor of the
residence at 66 College Street. Apart from occasional antiquarian excursions or festive reunions with the New York Kalem Club, Lovecraft essentially
maintained the existence of the scholarly recluse – writing an infrequent story, revising the work of others, but more often embarking upon brilliant
epistolary voyages to his ever widening circle of correspondents. Even though beset by uncertainty over his own creative work, Lovecraft had now
attained a peak of intellectual maturity as evinced through his profound letters to E. Hoffmann Price on the aesthetics of literature, his blazing
debate with Robert E. Howard on civilization versus barbarism, or his trenchant commentary to Clark Ashton Smith on the art of weird fantasy. Here too are contemporary accounts of Lovecraft’s travels in New Orleans and Quebec, his collaboration on Through the Gates of the Silver Key, a dinner engagement with A. Merritt, reminiscences of Henry S. Whitehead, formation of the Kappa Alpha Tau fraternity, plus hundreds of other subjects detailed in letters which preserve the innermost thoughts and dreams of the renowned twentieth century American fantaisiste.

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