Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others

by H.P. Lovecraft, David E. Schultz (Editor), S.T. Joshi (Editor)

This volume presents Lovecraft’s correspondence with Maurice W. Moe, who knew Lovecraft for nearly the entirety of the latter’s adult life, from 1914 to 1937. Moe, a high school teacher in Wisconsin, was a devoted amateur journalist and also a fervent and evangelical Christian, and both subjects elicited sharp discussions from Lovecraft. The Providence writer’s years-long assistance on Moe’s book about the appreciation of poetry, Doorways to Poetry, may have helped inspire his later weird verse, including the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets. The volume also contains Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence with Bernard Austin Dwyer, a weird fiction fan who engaged in wide-ranging discussions with Lovecraft on such subjects as cosmicism, Lovecraft’s upbringing, and political developments in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, the relatively few surviving letters that Lovecraft wrote to the poet Samuel Loveman, as well as a year-long correspondence with the noted bookman Vincent Starrett, are included here. As with other volumes, this book contains a fascinating array of writings by Lovecraft’s correspondents, ranging from Moe’s essay on “Life for God’s Sake” to a rare weird tale by Dwyer. The volume has been exhaustively annotated by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi.

630 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2018

About the author

Howard 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