What do you think?
Rate this book
Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft #4
Selected Letters IV: 1932-1934
1976 Arkham House hardcover in dust jacket
424 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1976
2 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
H.P. Lovecraft
6,108 books19.3k followersHoward Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 17, 2025
I’ve said it before – you cannot understand the man that HPL was without being at least acquainted with his voluminous letters. Every aspect of the Old Gent is laid out on the back of rejection letters, old envelopes and postcards…I’m sure if he had any idea how much his letters would be sought after (and traded for), he would have stopped writing them…(indeed in an early letter he talks about how he desperately tries to end some correspondences simply due to the sheer volume that he struggles to keep on top of).
Volume 4 of the Selected Letters is a meaty affair – there is plenty here for whatever side of HPL you are looking for. He has returned from New York, is mellowing in the surroundings he loves and, in all likelihood, is happy; even if it is in these pages that he is forced to leave Barnes Street for pastures new on College Street. He does have some money, however, and manages a trip to the South – New Orleans no less – and even describes his suntan in a letter to CAS…hardly the ‘mad loner isolated in his sickly room’ of legend!
Some nice elements to enjoy:
• Attending a reading of the Wasteland by TS Eliot
• A frankly beautiful discussion of book collecting “Nothing is so intimately a part of a man as his library.”
• Travelling on a shoestring budget
• The simple enjoyment he gets from eating ice cream
And then there is the letter to J Vernon Shea dated May 9 1933; I stated before in Volume III about how his unhappiness in New York led to his putting opinions on paper that he would later denounce (which you don’t often read about). In this particular letter he is very clear about his views on Hitler and the Nazi party – the views of a middle aged man in New England, derived from newspaper reports and independent reading, but not those of a man who has ever been to Europe. The year is important too – Hitler had only been in power a few months, and it’s 5 years away from Kristallnacht, let alone WW2. These were in no way controversial statements that he is making – and in fact quite damning at times “…of course it is silly to ban Jewish books…”. Fascism, like Marxism, is an intellectual / political movement being discussed and adopted by people very far from where their reality is being experienced.
But then he changes tact, starts back on to his disgust at New York and makes ridiculous racial statements, which are utterly indefensible. It’s like he’s stuck and I wish someone had been able to sit him down and have that conversation which would make him see the contradictions he so often made and allow me to believe that his convictions were not on solid ground, that his belligerence prevented him from making a step that I genuinely believe he was capable of, and possibly even would have, had he not met an untimely death.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending some of what he said, but again there is some context to take into account. These are ‘Selected Letters’ from a man with a barely imaginable correspondence. We are only seeing one side of the conversation in these volumes (as opposed to later releases from Hippocampus Press) and I believe that two things should be acknowledged:
1. There is little evidence that he is instigating these conversations; there is plenty of evidence that he is responding to direct questions about certain topics, to which he is answering. Does he give these any more head space than that of architecture or cinema? Probably not – had he not been asked, he may well never have written his views down.
2. Looking closely you can see repetition from closely written letters to different recipients – with such a volume of letters to write it is easy to see how something at the front of his mind from one letter can spill over to another, written the same day or thereabouts. This is not an indication of the importance of the subject to him, but again, his response to questions. He states “…I copy certain definite arguments or expositions from letters I have just written; circulating the copy among other correspondents interested in the same thing…”
The more you read of these letters, the more you can break down two groups – epistolary correspondence (predominantly where he is responding to requests for his views, history or opinions) and the correspondence he has with his friends, where he is much more free, more likely to converse ‘triviality’ and real pleasure comes from the pages, rather than the formal, stilted, letters to the former. He also never expected them to be read (no excuse for some of what he wrote):
“Cracker-barrel debating is all well enough for private correspondence – where all hands are laymen – but it makes me rather tired to see a half-baked ordinary guy shooting off his mouth in public on subjects which none but the very special student can rightly handle.”
And so, as the penultimate volume comes to an end, I shall take the opportunity to ‘copy certain definite arguments’ – HPL was a much more complex person than his 21st century reputation suggests. 100 years on, some statements he made are simply unacceptable in our modern world, and in fact even then he was at odds with members of even his closest circle. This volume has many such statements, but it also has so much more, and to fully appreciate why HPL retains such devotion now (as he did within his circle then) we have to read, appreciate and understand, the context in which these letters were written.
And then have a coffee and bowl of ice cream...
Volume 4 of the Selected Letters is a meaty affair – there is plenty here for whatever side of HPL you are looking for. He has returned from New York, is mellowing in the surroundings he loves and, in all likelihood, is happy; even if it is in these pages that he is forced to leave Barnes Street for pastures new on College Street. He does have some money, however, and manages a trip to the South – New Orleans no less – and even describes his suntan in a letter to CAS…hardly the ‘mad loner isolated in his sickly room’ of legend!
Some nice elements to enjoy:
• Attending a reading of the Wasteland by TS Eliot
• A frankly beautiful discussion of book collecting “Nothing is so intimately a part of a man as his library.”
• Travelling on a shoestring budget
• The simple enjoyment he gets from eating ice cream
And then there is the letter to J Vernon Shea dated May 9 1933; I stated before in Volume III about how his unhappiness in New York led to his putting opinions on paper that he would later denounce (which you don’t often read about). In this particular letter he is very clear about his views on Hitler and the Nazi party – the views of a middle aged man in New England, derived from newspaper reports and independent reading, but not those of a man who has ever been to Europe. The year is important too – Hitler had only been in power a few months, and it’s 5 years away from Kristallnacht, let alone WW2. These were in no way controversial statements that he is making – and in fact quite damning at times “…of course it is silly to ban Jewish books…”. Fascism, like Marxism, is an intellectual / political movement being discussed and adopted by people very far from where their reality is being experienced.
But then he changes tact, starts back on to his disgust at New York and makes ridiculous racial statements, which are utterly indefensible. It’s like he’s stuck and I wish someone had been able to sit him down and have that conversation which would make him see the contradictions he so often made and allow me to believe that his convictions were not on solid ground, that his belligerence prevented him from making a step that I genuinely believe he was capable of, and possibly even would have, had he not met an untimely death.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending some of what he said, but again there is some context to take into account. These are ‘Selected Letters’ from a man with a barely imaginable correspondence. We are only seeing one side of the conversation in these volumes (as opposed to later releases from Hippocampus Press) and I believe that two things should be acknowledged:
1. There is little evidence that he is instigating these conversations; there is plenty of evidence that he is responding to direct questions about certain topics, to which he is answering. Does he give these any more head space than that of architecture or cinema? Probably not – had he not been asked, he may well never have written his views down.
2. Looking closely you can see repetition from closely written letters to different recipients – with such a volume of letters to write it is easy to see how something at the front of his mind from one letter can spill over to another, written the same day or thereabouts. This is not an indication of the importance of the subject to him, but again, his response to questions. He states “…I copy certain definite arguments or expositions from letters I have just written; circulating the copy among other correspondents interested in the same thing…”
The more you read of these letters, the more you can break down two groups – epistolary correspondence (predominantly where he is responding to requests for his views, history or opinions) and the correspondence he has with his friends, where he is much more free, more likely to converse ‘triviality’ and real pleasure comes from the pages, rather than the formal, stilted, letters to the former. He also never expected them to be read (no excuse for some of what he wrote):
“Cracker-barrel debating is all well enough for private correspondence – where all hands are laymen – but it makes me rather tired to see a half-baked ordinary guy shooting off his mouth in public on subjects which none but the very special student can rightly handle.”
And so, as the penultimate volume comes to an end, I shall take the opportunity to ‘copy certain definite arguments’ – HPL was a much more complex person than his 21st century reputation suggests. 100 years on, some statements he made are simply unacceptable in our modern world, and in fact even then he was at odds with members of even his closest circle. This volume has many such statements, but it also has so much more, and to fully appreciate why HPL retains such devotion now (as he did within his circle then) we have to read, appreciate and understand, the context in which these letters were written.
And then have a coffee and bowl of ice cream...
Displaying 1 of 1 review