/lit/ - Literature

Would HP Lovecraft still have been a good author if his dad hadn't died of madness early on and he wasn't raised by his mom and aunts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC5VUbO0L1o

>>22215192
I love him so much anons... Lovecraft is more precious to me than any author. I know that he has flaws and I recognise them all, but I think he is great. I grew up with his work and it really made an impression on me. I didn't have a great childhood, and my early teens were the worst period of my life by far. My parents divorced when I was 9. I was shuttled between parents' houses every weekend. I moved to new towns and schools and could never make friends. Every few months, we would move house because my mum was breaking up with her boyfriend again. I lived in 11 or 12 different houses over the course of about 8 years. I even lived in the same house twice.

And that is where Lovecraft came in. With no friends, school clubs, or hobbies, I only had a few options. I had vidya and books. And if I could read anything to get away from reality, I needed the most engrossing stuff. When I was 12 years old, Lovecraft was there for me. I read this guy in bed every single night. I would stay up until 2 in the morning, secretly reading him. He spooked and thrilled me like no one else did. I was a bookish and depressive kid and got picked on, but I had brains. I was a Lovecraft character in the making. I could never read Robert E Howard because I couldn't relate to Conan. But when I was a kid, a young academic who likes history and folklore stumbling into a tomb of unknown horrors was written for me. When my school work got too stressful, I would read Lovecraft. When my lack of friends got to me, his characters were there for me. When I thought about my sheltered life, an equally sheltered protagonist saw the unseeable for me. But the protagonist went mad and suffered, so it also made me feel okay that I could just read about it.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Lovecraft saved a portion of my youth. He meant so much to me that I really can't express how much I love this man. I wish we got 10 more years of him. I miss him bros.

the actual /lit/ /ourguy/ is still making videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os6sfAdO13g

If Lovecraft was so good - which we all agree is true. Why wasn't he published in his own lifetime?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FI6xJNEiYw

>>I hate to leave the old spot, and have dismantled as little as possible in view of the advent of the moving man - a stalwart buck nigger with a horse-drawn team - tomorrow.
>>The house was vacant for inspection and it didn't take us three minutes to decide.
>> Boy, what a place! God Save the King!
>> At last - at last - after forty odd years of wistful worship and avid admiration - Grandpa Theobald will live in a REAL COLONIAL HOUSE. Praise George from whom all blessings flow!!
God Save the King!
God Save the King!
God Save the King!
God Save the King!
God Save the King!

>>20374523
>I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more

>>20060408
>I lost my fellow Anglo-Saxon, whose home is far to the north in the semi-African jungles of Harlem… My gawd—what a filthy dump! These swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are-- a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose, and imagination would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place. The streets, even in the centre, are filthy with old papers and vegetable debris -- probably the street-cleaners dislike to soil their white uniforms by visiting such infernos.

>The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They -or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed- seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay…a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point

>>20060437
>I lost my fellow Anglo-Saxon, whose home is far to the north in the semi-African jungles of Harlem… My gawd—what a filthy dump! These swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are-- a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose, and imagination would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place. The streets, even in the centre, are filthy with old papers and vegetable debris -- probably the street-cleaners dislike to soil their white uniforms by visiting such infernos.

>The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They -or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed- seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay…a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point.

>"down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly"
Perfectly valid or embarrassingly purple prose?

It's not that often that I see people praising Lovecraft's way of writing. I get that his choice of words and his use of adjectives and adverbs can sometimes be off-putting in their ridiculousness, but in the end, it's this absurdity that conveys to us an atmosphere of weirdness and a glimpse into things in the fringes of human understanding. I think he was aware of this, and meticulously chose every single word so that they would convey exactly what he wanted, even if the resulting phrases seemed ridiculous or even amateurish at first sight.

Sleep well, fag. See ya in the mornin'.

>>19139015
Almost.

1. The Whisperer in Darkness
2. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
3. At The Mountains of Madness
4. The Dunwich Horror
5. The Call of Cthulhu

>>18062412
>Lovecraft wasn't good
He was great

Lovecraftian *pushes glasses up nose