As a teenager I loved to read Lovecraft. It was a way to learn English as a nice side effect because it isn’t my native language but that also obscured the appalling racism from me which lead to disappointment when I found out later.
Lovecraft deserves some redemption. First of all he wasn’t especially racist, just the “normal” amount for his time (take with a grain of salt please!).
More importantly he significantly mellowed out in his later years primarily due to exposure to talented black writers which made him realize the error of his ways.
I had heard Dr. Fu Manchu referenced places when reading as a teen so I ended up finding the books. I was jaw in the floor shocked by the casual racism when I read them.
Other people have already confirmed he was a racist, but think Clinical Xenophobe is a more apt distinction. He was a unconformable around minorities, but he was also unconformable about the ocean and the color violet. And he wrote about his discomfort. He didn’t write political manifests. This isn’t a case of separating the art from the artist, but seeing the art to see the broken person behind it.
As a teenager I loved to read Lovecraft. It was a way to learn English as a nice side effect because it isn’t my native language but that also obscured the appalling racism from me which lead to disappointment when I found out later.
Lovecraft deserves some redemption. First of all he wasn’t especially racist, just the “normal” amount for his time (take with a grain of salt please!). More importantly he significantly mellowed out in his later years primarily due to exposure to talented black writers which made him realize the error of his ways.
But yeah, I wouldn’t ask him to name my void cat.
Lovecraft was especially racist by the standards of his time, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/1897rk2/was_lovecraft_racist_even_by_the_standards_of_his/
No, he was really really racist for the time. But he did get better at the end.
I had heard Dr. Fu Manchu referenced places when reading as a teen so I ended up finding the books. I was jaw in the floor shocked by the casual racism when I read them.
This cereal was popular in the 1960s. They even had a kids’ cartoon with the little ‘Chinese’ boy ‘So-Hi.’
Rice Crinkles cereal
https://www.mrbreakfast.com/cereal_detail.asp?id=314
NSFW
Other people have already confirmed he was a racist, but think Clinical Xenophobe is a more apt distinction. He was a unconformable around minorities, but he was also unconformable about the ocean and the color violet. And he wrote about his discomfort. He didn’t write political manifests. This isn’t a case of separating the art from the artist, but seeing the art to see the broken person behind it.