When historians study literature, regardless of the time period the purpose has

been to uncover information about the prevailing trends and concerns of the population

through clues such as an author’s use of language, plot devices, use of characters, and any

moods evoked by the work. In the course of the analysis of fiction writers, historians

typically have been more interested in novels that reveal multiple layers and dimensions

characteristic of dynamic storytelling. H. P. Lovecraft, an American author of the early

twentieth century, who is still well known for his Anglicized tales of weird fiction, is

often overlooked because of his simplistic form and dreamy language. Although

Lovecraft's work typically does not employ very technical or dynamic devices, his mood-

evoking descriptiveness makes his work a fitting subject of analysis for modern

historians. The purpose of this paper is to analyze one of his more languid tales, The

Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, by providing a brief sketch on his background, a

discourse on the novel and additional criticisms on Lovecraft and America during the fin

de siecle.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode

Island. He came from distinguished ancestry – “his maternal line, the Phillipses, could

trace its lineage almost to the Mayflower"1. His paternal line was of English origin, and

Lovecraft could trace well into the fifteenth century. The early death of his father left his

mother’s family to care for him. Lovecraft’s earliest literary influences came from his

maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. His classical studies inspired an

interest in the study of Hellenism at a very young age. At one point his two favorite

1
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium,
http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/lovecraft.html
"H. P. Lovecraft", Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_P_Lovecraft/.
subjects were Hellenism and astronomy. Astronomy later led him to develop his “cosmic

philosophy wherein mankind is but a flyspeck amidst the vorteces of infinite space”2. In

early adulthood he joined the United Amateur Press Association. As an amateur writer,

he wrote more fiction but until 1922 regarded himself as more of a poet and essayist3.

Much of his income was provided by the Phillips family inheritance, literary

revision, and ghostwriting for authors such as Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop and Adolphe

de Castro. Shortly after his mother died in 1921, he attended an amateur journalism

convention in Boston, where he met the woman who would later become his wife, Sonia

Greene. After three years they married and settled in New York. He was unable to find

work and was too proud to tell his aunts that his wife was a working woman. “The

family’s social standing, in spite of their poverty, was too precious to be tainted by a

tradeswoman wife; the marriage ended in divorce by 19294. After returning to Rhode

Island, he produced almost all of his best known short stories, including The Dream

Quest of Unknown Kadath5.

His love of ‘abstract truth and of scientific logick’ compelled him to pursue a

wide range of academic interests, which included literature, philosophy, chemistry,

astronomy, astrophysics, anthropology, psychology, art, and architecture. However, the

most important of Lovecraft’s contributions to literature was the development of "a

coherent philosophy that served as the fountainhead for his entire literary work"6. He felt

sufficiently certain that the nebular hypothesis of Laplace explained the evolution of the

universe; that the Darwinian theory "abolished the myth of the 'soul' and the argument
2
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
"H. P. Lovecraft", Wikipedia.
6
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium.
from design"; and the work of anthropologists E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer accounted for

the natural origin of mankind’s belief in the supernatural, which satisfied an atheistic

viewpoint. Lovecraft developed hostility to religion because it made false assertions as to

the nature of entity. According to Joshi, this hostility increased with the years, which

culminated in an expression of contempt against an orthodoxy that had continued to

brainwash the younger generations, in spite of the revelations of scientific evidence to the

contrary7.

His view of politics shifted drastically through his life. He began as a monarchist

who lamented the American Revolution and the split with England, and ended as a

confirmed socialist. At the heart of Lovecraft’s political philosophy was the notion of

culture – "the massed traditions of each race, society and region". Anything that impeded

the process of culture, which for Lovecraft meant democracy and capitalism, he could not

support8. In fact, following the great depression of the 1920’s, he was even more

compelled to adopt socialism9. He felt that capitalism cheapened the value of artistic

excellence and sincerity. He also felt that socialism and aristocracy were mirror images

of one another.

Lovecraft’s political philosophy would be incomplete if his racism had gone

neglected. This was one area where Lovecraft failed to exercise the "flexibility of mind"

that he exhibited elsewhere. “In race alone his attitude remained monolithic” 10. Lovecraft

7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
Joshi, S. T., editor, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1980), 15: “Within 15 years, he developed his political views into a ‘form of fascistic socialism entailing
governmental ownership of industry, artificially allotted employment, regulated salaries and old age
pensions with similar measures.”
10
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium.
insisted on an impassable color-line, and had established a racial hierarchy11. He held

English culture to be the pinnacle of civilization, with English descendents in America as

a second class only to English ancestry, and everyone else below them12. Joshi reminds

the reader that Lovecraft’s racial views were not unusual in his time. Lovecraft’s racial

viewpoint enters into his fiction in a particularly pervasive way. Some examples of his

work are "thinly veiled projections of his racialist fears of an alien overthrow of Nordic

culture through excessive immigration and miscegenation."13

In The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, the main character, Randolph Carter,

has dream-sequenced visions of an ancient city and each time is pulled away from it

when he wakes up. The topography of Randolph Carter's reality submerges into a fantasy

realm as he descends into dreaming to embark on a heroic journey in his attempt to plead

with the universal gods for access to the ancient city. Along the way his journey is

impeded by a series of confrontations with grotesque creatures. When Carter meets with

one of the gods, he is told to leave the dreamland and return to his waking reality. The

topography and characters were representative of places and ethnicities that impacted

Lovecraft. For instance, the topography reveals the importance of understanding the

landscape of New England, New York, and what they symbolize to Lovecraft. Maurice

Levy focuses his attention on the characters, the region of New England, the sea and the

universe. In the novel, geographic space is substituted by malefic space. Dream

topography is superimposed onto real topography14.

11
Ibid.
12
"H. P. Lovecraft", Wikipedia.
13
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft".
14
Levy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, ed. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1988), 41.
 Within the dream landscape, the sea and the universe are important regions of the

dream topography in Lovecraft’s writings. Both the sea and the universe are host to the

uncertainties that faced Lovecraft as an early twentieth century man. The sea is also a

part of the Lovecraftian landscape that represents a primordial host of horrors. “It is

inhabited by monsters that menace the peace of mankind and pull men in after them into

their original element.”15 One of Lovecraft’s highest fears regarding diverse ethnic

migrations to the northeast coast of the United States was that they would detract from

the purity of Anglo-saxon culture and drag down New England society.

The characters consist of Randolph Carter and a series of unearthly beings that

Carter meets along his journey. None of the non-human beings have any significant

importance as characters in the novel, in comparison to Carter. The characters,

particularly Randolph Carter, as Levy points out, are descended from the oldest families

of New England, and Miskatonic University represents famed Brown University. They

represent Lovecraft’s admiration for a pure ancestry that dates back to antiquarian

England16. The novel, in this regard, re-emphasizes that Lovecraft is who he is because

of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee. “The need to root his work in

native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on,” and led to a gradual

transformation of New England "as the locus of both wonder and terror".17

Carter is a direct representation of Lovecraft. The reason why the monstrous

unearthly characters have been given the simplified task of presence is that they represent

eons of intermingling between unearthly and even inferior men. The creatures, therefore,

are directly representational of the hordes of immigrants in New York during the 1920s.
15
Ibid, 40.
16
Ibid, 41.
17
Joshi, S. T., A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, (Berkeley
Heights: Wildside Publishing, 1999), 125.
Lovecraft doesn’t fail to recognize that people with varied ethnic backgrounds have been

part of the human race for thousands upon thousands of years, but casts the immigrant

workers in New York as amorphous beings who are either inferior or have had their

culture washed out of their blood. Given the background of his wife, an immigrant

woman of Russian-Jewish descent, it may have been particularly ironic for Lovecraft to

have developed and stood unwaveringly with regard to his thesis on the hierarchy of

inferiority and incompatibility among various ethnic groups.

Not only did race play a significant role in Lovecraft's work, but class sentiments

were also very revealing in Lovecraft's life and his work. In an extension of the character

analysis, Joshi argues that the novel is an instantiation of the awareness that Lovecraft’s

life in an alien environment made him more sharply cognizant of his "roots as a New

England Yankee"18. Before he wrote the novel, he was living in New York, where his

wife supported him as a successful tradeswoman. Overwhelmed with familial pride, he

was crushed that he was cast out of the traditional role of breadwinner. In upper class

New England society, it was taboo for women to concern themselves with work, since it

was a male-dominated occupation. His language was atypical for a man living in the

early twentieth century. He had incorporated old British English as a symbol of his

longing for more security. However, his language also represented his status as a man

who was part of an upper-class system that was falling out of favor in the twentieth

century. Thus, through Lovecraft's antiquated language, the twentieth century was

represented as a land of opportunity in which class barriers had been abolished.

18
Ibid, 113.
 Carter, according to Donald Burleson, wages war on “the limitations of the

structure of the psyche.” 19 When Lovecraft sought freedom from the constraining bonds

of reality, it was from the universe as an "unswerving mechanism with rigid natural

laws"20. This freedom required the escape of the imagination21. Carter, as has been

previously established, is the embodiment of Lovecraft. As Joshi states, Carter’s natural

course is to wake from his dream and realize the beauty in his world22. The Dream Quest

of Unknown Kadath, Burleson continues, is riddled with Jungian symbolism. Carter’s

quest is that he must confront his shadow, or dark side23. The novel provides an ending

of philosophical insight24. It is through the use of the dreamy language and landscape

that Lovecraft enables him to carry out this mythic battle 25. This idea is also supported

by Peter Cannon: “As he had in dreamland, Carter in his wandering among space and

time passes through certain prescribed stages on his way to a new self-understanding” for

the Dream-Quest."26

According to Burleson, Lovecraft’s war on the fragile human condition is directly

related to his inability to reconcile the uncertainty of the universe. Where he fails to exert

control over the natural laws of the universe, Lovecraft put an entire system of

imagination into place by constructing a dream world, which resolved in an epiphany27.

Levy also suggests that the horrors and supernatural elements are the sum of

chaos in the universe that defies the natural laws of nature as they were understood in
19
Burleson, Donald R., H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Co.,
1983), 121.
20
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium.
21
Ibid.
22
Joshi, S. T., A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, 114.
23
Burleson, 124.
24
Ibid, 125.
25
Levy, 101.
26
Cannon, Peter, H. P. Lovecraft (Boston: Twayne Publishing, 1989), 106.
27
Burleson, Donald R., H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Co.,
1983), 124.
Lovecraft’s age28. Lovecraft, though he struggles to make sense of the scientific

discoveries of the twentieth century, becomes aware that the machinations of the laws of

the universe are too highly structured for him to reconcile. The dreamy language was a

form of rebellion against the well-structured universal laws that had been discovered in

the early twentieth century. In addition, Lovecraft's view of prestige losing its place in

the twentieth century also represented his shame towards losing his place in society. He

was most certainly not alone in his ethnocentrism. This led to the inability of the upper

class to cope with the uncertainty of its place in the twentieth century. For Lovecraft, the

uncertainty of the human condition in the twentieth century was defined by his fears of

the immigrants in New York and the dissolution of the aristocracy.

The focus on the deities no longer presenting the horrific visage of the unknown

signifies that religion ceased to exhibit a stronghold over society, as it had done in ages

past. “The deities themselves no longer have that horrible aspect, those madness-inducing

forms, which characterized them when they manifested themselves in the waking world.

Their progeny in particular – for the gods of the depths willingly borrow human forms"29.

This makes it easier for characters to face and even defeat the gods. Such an act is best

characterized by Carter’s face to face encounter with Nyarlathotep , a deity representing

the crawling chaos, in human form30. Indeed, the early twentieth century was becoming a

growing non-religious world, which replaced religion with scientific and technological

achievements. Joshi suggests that Lovecraft was considerably influenced by

anthropologists Fiske and Frazer, who trace the ‘natural origin of religious belief in

28
Levy, 82.
29
Ibid, 105.
30
Ibid, 105.
primitive man’, in addition to the writings of the British occult authors, such as Arthur

Machen and Aleister Crowley.

As Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos indicates where he says: “For know you, that your

gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in

youth”31, the source of Carter/Lovecraft’s dreamland is the prosaic world of New

England. In this statement, Lovecraft contrasts the idealized world of class structure from

his youth with the mundane reality to which it stands opposed32. Historic New England

passes on in the wake the development of a modern, metropolitan New York.

In addition to the discourse on the novel itself, more in-depth points are of

particular interest to the study of Lovecraft, this novel, and the old-world view at the turn

of the century. It is important when studying Lovecraft to remember that he was not

simply an uneducated anglophile. As his biography revealed, Lovecraft was very

enthusiastic about reading the classics, as well as pursuing academic subjects and

composing literary models of responses for the scientific and technological to the

religious and political questions of the early twentieth century. What is particularly

enigmatic about Lovecraft is how he could have been so progressive about science and

politics, so well read in the classics and skilled in poetry and prose, but so backward with

regard to other cultures.

Therefore, it is clear that Lovecraft was guided by some element with regard to

his reverence and nostalgia for the time of his youth. Lovecraft’s "'love for the past

fostered the principal strain in his aesthetic of the weird – the defeat or confounding of

time,'33 and 'his love of the ancient and the permanent' allowed him to evolve an ethic that

31
Lovecraft, H. P, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 138.
32
Joshi, S. T., editor, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, 157.
33
"H. P. Lovecraft", Wikipedia,
placed tradition at its center.”34 Joshi suggests that Lovecraft’s antiquarian ethnocentrism

was not uncommon for his time, social position and milieu, but that they were

"repeatedly and strongly expressed on paper". Having based his theories on Darwin,

Huxley et. al., “he sincerely considered it detrimental for ‘incompatible peoples and races

to intermingle too heavily, lest culture-patterns become congealed into an amorphous

homogeneity". His beliefs were briefly accentuated by an increase of the destruction of

foreign renovation of the beautiful old homes of Providence, Rhode Island. It was

symbolic reduction of the “aura of the past” which Lovecraft thought should be preserved

for the sake of culture35. His special detail of the architecture in The Dream Quest of

Unknown Kadath, in light of his own conceptualization of the ancient homes of Rhode

Island, help clarify to the reader the importance of the description. Not only does it evoke

a mood of revelry but accentuates the importance of the past that echoes Lovecraft's loss

of his heritage - both genetic and environmental - to the twentieth century.

Various critics have compared and contrasted Lovecraft's work with that of Lord

Dunsany. Donald Burleson, in his analysis of H. P. Lovecraft, was one of many who

established a definitive link between Lovecraft, and his languid predecessor, Lord

Dunsany. Lord Dunsany, or Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany,

an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist whose own style, called Dunsanianism, was

notorious for illustrating the fantastic36. He was an important figure in establishing part

of the foundation of the fantasy genre37. Burleson describes The Dream Quest of

Unknown Kadath as “a Dunsanian fantasy, a horror tale, a tale of reflective of love of

34
Joshi, S. T., "H. P. Lovecraft", The Scriptorium.
35
Joshi, S. T., editor, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, 14.
36
Dunsany Family and Estate, "Lord Dunsany," http://www.dunsany.net/18th.htm.
37
Ibid. In part "with that of Poe, Morris and Rider Haggard, and fed into later work such as that of
Tolkien, Lewis and Lovecraft."
New England, a dream-narrative"38. He continued “it is as if Lovecraft sought to express

all his major emotionalities from his love of cats and New England and Lord Dunsany to

his fascination with dreams and his sense of the horror underlying man’s precarious

position in the cosmos.”39 However, S. T. Joshi argues that the novel presents a

repudiation of Dunsanianism. According to Joshi, “Dunsanianism led Lovecraft to

believe that the only way to salvage art in an age whose scientific discoveries have

shattered so many previous illusions about life is to ‘take an Epicurean delight in those

combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial,’40.

“It is frequently conjectured that The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is the carrying

out of Lovecraft’s old novel idea ‘Azathoth’" which was written in 1922. Both Azathoth

and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath center around a similar theme in which

protagonists "venture on a quest to some wondrous land". However, Joshi suggests that

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and Azathoth contain opposing plot lines. In

Azathoth, which was written at the height of Lovecraft’s decadent phase, the unnamed

narrator “traveled out of life on a quest into the spaces wither the world’s dreams had

fled”, but he does this because “age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the

minds of men.” Thus, the narrator’s only refuge from “prosy reality is the world of

dream”41.

Phillip Shreffler’s analysis of the novel describes the means by which Lovecraft

enabled his characters to engage in the ‘dream quest’, by explaining that the characters

lapsed into such worlds "through a kind of out-of-body travel that occurs during sleep"42.

38
Burleson, 121.
39
Ibid, 121-2.
40
Joshi, S. T., A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, 112-3.
41
Ibid, 115.
42
Shreffler, Phillip A., The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport: Greenwood, 1977), 16.
Among the themes of early twentieth century occult writers in England were subjects of

eastern religious philosophies, occultism, theosophy, and other new age concepts which

were prevalent among discourse of the late nineteenth century. Out-of-body travel also

originated from the occultist camp of literature.

Lovecraft had a long history of interest in a variety of academic subjects. He also

attempted to find a level ground between the realistic and the supernatural. As Joshi

explains, “Lovecraft has carved out a place for his work, between the too non-

supernatural and the too supernatural. His intermediate ground, his “non-supernatural

cosmic art” presents accounts of phenomena not currently explainable by science43. It is

also apparent that Lovecraft was heavily influenced by English supernatural writers.

Shreffler notes that the Welsh Machen and Lord Dunsany, among all English

supernatural writers, had the greatest influence. Lovecraft was versed well enough in the

British horrific tradition to select elements of plot devices that he felt were literally

sound. Through his understanding of the conventions of Gothicism, Lovecraft modified

the gothic writing style and successfully incorporated British ambience of antiquity into

his work44. By doing so, he also created a genre that was built from Gothicism, but was

best known as "weird-fiction".

One of Lovecraft's most amazing contributions to weird fiction was the

development of a pantheon of deities and demons known as the Cthulhu mythos. Joshi

drew a parallel between Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, of which we see little in The Dream

Quest of Unknown Kadath, and Christianity through the use of a character set known as

the Elder gods45. A major turn in Lovecraft's structure, as it relates to interactions

43
Joshi, S. T., A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, 152.
44
Shreffler, 18.
45
Joshi, S. T., A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, 130.
between man and deity is in the discourse between Carter and Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep

appears out of his normal form and assumes human form to approach and deliver his

message to Carter. What is particularly characteristic about this change from Lovecraft's

typical style is that this is the first time that a human character is able to commune

directly with one of the elder gods, that being said, Nyarlathotep is not described as a

particularly powerful deity. There is without a doubt more than an implied hierarchy of

gods in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Shreffler is particularly unique in his criticism of

Lovecraft, in that he attempts to address a means by which Lovecraft approached the task

of creating this pantheon to incorporate into his novels. Shreffler argues that Lovecraft

started with a set of facts – that demons of some kind have always been worshipped by

organized cults – and constructed a pantheon of gods and monstrosities assumed as the

basis for the widespread belief in certain archetypal deities or prevalent occult practices.

In so doing, Shreffler describes that in addition to Lovecraft’s invention and imagination,

Lovecraft drew upon at least three major areas of occultism for the creation of the

Cthulhu Mythos: the Old Religion, witchcraft hysteria, and demonology46.

The Old Religion was defined as a system of Pagan worship to have survived

throughout history, unvanquished by Christianity, with a rising population of witches in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their claim was that the ancients' lives,

which were essentially primitive, relied upon "the success of agriculture, the most

important principle in the cosmic scheme with the female principle"47, since women were

most closely associated with the processes of birth and generation. Since Lovecraft was

not particularly fond of women in general, he tended to neglect incorporating the

46
Shreffler, 164.
47
Ibid, 164.
feminine principles into his own pantheon. Indeed, the Cthulhu mythos is almost entirely

comprised of male elements.

The witchcraft hysteria, referenced a "massive cultural dragnet" from the

sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries48, which reigned in more innocents than people

who were actually guilty of its violation to the Catholic church, the worship of a

hierarchy of demonic entities. Shreffler identifies witchcraft hysteria as "a kind of cosmic

trap established and condoned by theological doctrine", signifying that the Christianity

was in part to blame for the vicious cycle of oppression in which its victims could not

escape. Of more direct significance to Lovecraft was the role of witchcraft hysteria as an

historical backdrop to the tales set in New England.

Demonology, the study of demonic hierarchies, with relation witchcraft as an

anti-Christian practice, and sorcery49 was a focus of both theologians and a series of

famous Occultists50. It was a study in which tracts of such hierarchies had been

constructed as far back as the fourth century c.e. Lovecraft's research into occult matters

led him to the discovery of the grimoire, or magical text, as a centerpiece for

demonology. As such, they were handbooks that contained information about spirit

hierarchies, the likes of which were paramount to the study of demonology51.

It has already been established that he was an avid reader of anthropologist, J. G.

Frazer, whose magnum opus, The Golden Bough, traced the origin of religious belief and

ritual back to its primitive origins. For Lovecraft, the works of Frazer and other

anthropologists writing in the early twentieth century help substantiate the idea that

religion is but a primitive belief, and that religion was functional for people who rejected
48
Ibid, 164.
49
Ibid, 164-5.
50
Ibid, 169.
51
Ibid, 170-1.
scientific and technological advancements. Reading Frazer spawned an interest to read

other authors on occultism. He also read Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western

Europe, A. E. Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, as well as any published

and available information from the Golden Dawn52. His Cthulhu Mythos, therefore, was

formed with a backdrop of historical research on the developments of Occultism in both

Britain and America. He focused on the historical elements in Salem was a genuinely

horrific New England event, against which to set his twentieth-century New England

horror tales53. Unlike other authors, "Lovecraft surrounds the reader with cosmic demons

whose existence is supported by history and whose appearances in specific places at

specific times have been chronicled”54.

H. P. Lovecraft was a native New Englander whose writings matured and

emerged from the tail end of the romantic era. What he lacked in dynamic storytelling, he

more than made up for in his allusion and languid descriptiveness on the topography and

strange characters that represented the changes on the Northeast coast of the United

States in the early twentieth century. Lovecraft's use of dreamy language acted as a

backlash against the uniquely-ordered structure to the discoveries of the physical laws of

the universe, set against the overburdening principles of uncertainty concerning the

human condition. Basing his own mythology on a combination of imagination and

anthropological study of magic and the occult from the 19th century, he provided an

52
Ibid, 164, 176: “Just before the turn of the century, there emerged in England one of the most
celebrated socieities dedicated to the practice of ceremonial magic ever to exist. It was called the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, and it counted among its members some of the day’s most illustrious men and
women. Irish poet and mystic W. B. Yeats belonged, as did Aleister Crowley, the most famous magus of
modern times and a man reputed by the press to be the “wickedest” man on earth. Robert Louis Stevenson
was said to have been tangentially associated with the Golden Dawn, and other members of note included
horror story writers Algernon Blackwood an Arthur Machen, as well as occultists Samuel Liddel
MacGregor Mathers and Arthur Edward Waite.
53
Ibid, 168.
54
Ibid, 173.
historical background for the context of his hero journey. Unlike his other tales, he

enables his character to have confrontations with divine beings, which communicate

further criticisms about ideas of religion to the thinking man in an age of atheism. In

addition, his character sketches are the quintessential commentary on the amorphous

blend of immigrants in New York during the 1920s, and how it impacted antiquated

notions of the class system in the early twentieth century in America. Future analyses of

H. P. Lovecraft would yield great benefit in not only class system studies of the early

twentieth century, but also in the impact that the rise of occultism in the nineteenth

century had on twentieth century society.

Burleson, Donald R., H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport: Greenwood, 1983.

Cannon, Peter. H. P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

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Joshi, S. T., trans. H. P. Lovecraft: Four decades of Criticism. Athens: University of

Joshi, S. T. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. Berkeley

The Scriptorium. "H. P. Lovecraft."

Levy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Detroit:

Lovecraft, H. P. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Ballantine: New York, 1970.

Shreffler, Phillip A. The H. P. Lovecraft Companion. Greenwood: Westport, 1977.

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