LibriVox
Established	August 2005
Location	Worldwide (USA based)
Collection
Size	over 5,400 free audiobooks (April 2012)
Access and use
Circulation	90 new audiobooks per month in 2011
Members	World-wide volunteers
Other information
Budget	$5,000 per annum
Director	Directorless - community shared
Staff	3540 contributing volunteers
Website	http://librivox.org

LibriVox (various pronunciations are accurate^[1]) is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher.^[2] The LibriVox objective is "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet".^[3]

In April 2012, it had a catalogue of over 5,400 unabridged books and shorter works available to download^[4] and produced on average 90 audiobooks per month.^[5] Around ninety percent of the collection is in English, although LibriVox recordings are available in 33 languages altogether.

History[link]

Hugh McGuire, founder of LibriVox

LibriVox works per month

LibriVox was started in August 2005 by Montreal-based writer Hugh McGuire, who set up a blog, and posed the question.^[6][7]

The initial response to this question was positive enough that the first LibriVox recording was made available in MP3 format within a month of the blog going live. It was a recording of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, with chapters recorded by McGuire and eleven volunteers who had been attracted by the blog.

In October 2005, LibriVox acquired its own URL (librivox.org), on which McGuire set up a web forum, and the number of volunteers and works made available began steadily to grow. A total of 30 books were recorded and released through the website by the end of the year.

By late 2006, the site was releasing around 30 books per month, and coverage of the project on the Internet and in the traditional press saw the number of volunteers recording for the site move into the hundreds.

By January 2009, over 2,000 Librivox books and short works had been published, using the voices of 2,400 volunteers. By December 2010, the total was 4,000, using the voices of nearly 4,000 volunteers from around the world.

The main features of the way LibriVox works have changed little since its inception, although the technology that supports it has been improved by the efforts of those of its volunteers with web-development skills.

LibriVox etymology [link]

LibriVox is an invented word inspired by Latin. The word comes from two Latin words libri which is the nominative plural form of liber (book), and vox (voice). Thus, LibriVox means BookVoice. In an alternative English/Latin combination it means LibraryVoice. A similar word in Latin, liberi is plural and means child, offspring. This has sometimes led people to erroneously believe that the word means Child of the Voice, and free, independent, unrestricted meaning FreeVoice.^[8]. Both of these are completely wrong considering that liberi is plural and that vox is nominative and not genitive.

There has been no decision or consensus by LibriVox founders or the community of volunteers for a single pronunciation of LibriVox. It is accepted that any audible pronunciation is accurate.^[1]

Organization and funding [link]

LibriVox is a volunteer-run, free content, Public Domain project. It has no budget or legal personality. The development of projects is managed through an Internet forum, supported by an admin team, who also maintain a searchable catalogue database of completed works.

In early 2010 LibriVox ran a fundraising drive to raise $20,000 to cover hosting costs for the website of about $5,000/year and improve front- and backend usability.^[9] The target was reached in 13 days, so the fundraising ended and LibriVox suggested that supporters consider making donations to its partners Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.^[3]

In 2012 LibriVox received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, helping the community to rebuild its technical infrastructure and improving accessibility of the website.^[10]

Production process[link]

Volunteers can choose new projects to start, either recording on their own or inviting others to join them, or they can contribute to projects that have been started by others. Once a volunteer has recorded his or her contribution, it is uploaded to the site, and proof-listened by members of the LibriVox community.

Finished audiobooks are available from the LibriVox website, and MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files are hosted separately by the Internet Archive. Recordings are also available through other means, such as iTunes, and, being free of copyright, they are frequently distributed independently of LibriVox on the Internet and otherwise.

Content[link]

LibriVox only records material that is in the Public Domain in the United States, and all LibriVox books are released with a Public Domain dedication. The stated goal of the project is: "...to make all public domain books available, for free, in audio format on the Internet".^[11] Because of copyright restrictions, LibriVox produces recordings of only a limited number of contemporary books. These have included, for example, the 9/11 Commission Report.

The LibriVox catalogue is varied. It contains much popular classic fiction, but also includes less predictable texts, such as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a recording of the first 500 digits of pi. The collection also features poetry, plays, religious texts (for example, English versions of the Koran and books from various versions of the Bible) and non-fiction of various kinds. In January 2009, the catalogue contained approximately 55 percent fiction and drama, 25 percent non-fiction and 20 percent poetry (calculated by numbers of recordings). By the end of 2011, the most downloaded item was a 2007 collaborative recording of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, downloaded a total of 812,452 times.^[12] The most downloaded solo recording was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn read by Annie Coleman downloaded 701,509 times.^[12]

Around 90 percent of the catalogue is recorded in English, but recordings exist in 31 languages altogether (as of February 2010). Chinese, French and German are the most popular languages other than English amongst volunteers, but recordings have also been made in languages including Urdu and Tagalog.

Examples [link]

• Novel — Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Non-fiction — Capital, Volume 1 by Karl Marx
• Poetry — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Drama — The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• Logic — Prior Analytics by Aristotle
• Children's literature — Children's short works collection
• Spanish — Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes
• French — La femme de trente ans by Honoré de Balzac
• Chinese — Lun Yu (The Analects) by Confucius
• Finnish — Rautatie by Juhani Aho

Reputation and quality[link]

	Prologues of Moby Dick Stewart Wills' 2007 reading of Moby Dick is, as of July 2011, the most praised librivox recording of all their 6 years.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

LibriVox has garnered significant interest, in particular from those interested in the promotion of volunteer-led content and alternative approaches to copyright ownership on the Internet.

It has received support from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Mike Linksvayer, Vice-President of Creative Commons, has described it as "perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia".^[13]

The project has also been featured in press around the world, and has been recommended by the BBC's Click, MSNBC's The Today Show, Wired, the US PC Magazine and the UK Metro and Sunday Times newspapers.

A frequent concern of listeners is the site's policy of allowing any recording to be published as long as it is basically understandable and faithful to the source text.^[14] This means that some recordings are of less-than-optimum audio fidelity, and some feature background noises, non-native accents or other perceived imperfections in comparison to professionally-recorded audiobooks.^[15][16] While listeners may object to those books with chapters read by multiple readers,^[17] others find this to be either a non-issue or a potentially entertaining feature.^[18][19][20]

Other readers are praised by listeners for the quality of their output.^[21]

References [link]

External links [link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: LibriVox

Wikinews has related news: May 2006 Interview with LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire

Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision of the "LibriVox" article dated 2007-07-14, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)

More spoken articles

LibriVox site

• LibriVox home page and LibriVox Catalogue of Audio Books

Articles

• Xeni Tech story from NPR's Day to Day, "Amateur Audio Books Catch Fire on the Web"
• Reason Magazine: The Wealth of LibriVox (May 2007)

LibriVox tools

• Embed LibriVox Audio in your Site

LibriVox mirrors

• LibriVox at Internet Archive (full mirror with streaming and reviews)
• LibriVox at Apple.com iTunes
• LibriVox at Disc Shelf

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ( /ˈvɒnɨɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was a 20th century American writer.^[2] His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual.^[3] He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.^[4]

Life[link]

Early years[link]

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Lieber.^[5] Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution.^[6] Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated into Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun.^[7] He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army.^[8] The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.^[2]

On Mothers' Day in 1944, when Vonnegut was 21, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills.^[9]

World War II[link]

Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..."^[10] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away.^[11] While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.^[12]

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.^[11] Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."^[13]

Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border.^[11] Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,"^[14][15] later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".^[16]

Post-war career[link]

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time."^[17] Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them.^{[citation needed]} According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, located within the town of Glenville, just across the Mohawk River from the city of Schenectady. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment located along Alplaus Creek across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived for a brief time still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories; Vonnegut carved his name on its underside. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.^[18][19]

In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.^[20] On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine^[21] and the Modern Library.^[22]

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod,^[23] where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S.^[24]

Personal life[link]

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.^[2] Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer;^[25] and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote two books, one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery, and one which includes anecdotes of growing up as his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, and what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.^[26]

His daughter Edith "Edie", an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book titled Domestic Goddesses and was once married to Geraldo Rivera. His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny"), was named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose".

Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.

Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky^[27] and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.^[28]

A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide".^[29] On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut.^[30]

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.^[2][31][32]

Writing career[link]

Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect"^[33] appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959.^[34] Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a Master's Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device.

These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.

"I know," I said.

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said.

Deadeye Dick, although mostly set in the mid-20th century, foreshadows the turbulent times of contemporary America; it ends prophetically with the lines "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet." The novel explores themes of social isolation and alienation that are particularly relevant in the postmodern world. Society is seen as openly hostile or indifferent at best, and popular culture as superficial and excessively materialistic.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.^[35]

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle).

Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, in his seminal short story "Harrison Bergeron" egalitarianism is rigidly enforced by overbearing state authority, engendering horrific repression.

In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). It is characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used ironically in reference to death, also originated in Slaughterhouse-Five. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein."^[31]

With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor,^[36] until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.^[37]

An August 2006 article reported:

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today — or so he claims. "I've given up on it... It won't happen... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"^[13]

The April 2008 issue of Playboy featured the first published excerpt from Armageddon in Retrospect, the first posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. The book itself was published in the same month. It included never before published short stories by the writer and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. The introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut.

Vonnegut also taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.^[38]

Art career[link]

Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

In 2004, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, for which he created an album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Politics[link]

Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[39]

Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."^[40][41] In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities,or 'PPs.'"^[42] When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."^[43]

He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."^[44]

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied, "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"] from Horace's Odes, or possibly to Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his Dulce Et Decorum Est.) Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Mark, responded to the article by writing an editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."^[45]

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' "^[13]

Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."^[43]

Religion[link]

Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of "conventional religious beliefs."^[46] His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut had authored a freethought book titled Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him.^[47]

Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic,^[47] freethinker,^[48] humanist,^[48] Unitarian Universalist,^[49] agnostic,^[47] and atheist.^[50] He disbelieved in the supernatural,^[47] considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.^[51]

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought,^[52] and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism.^[53] In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007.^[54] In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."^[55]

Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation.^[47][56] Palm Sunday reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book Fates Worse Than Death. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York.^[57] Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars.^[48] Vonnegut's parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and his son had at one time aspired to become a Unitarian minister.^[47]

Vonnegut's views on religion were unconventional and nuanced. While rejecting the divinity of Jesus,^[50] he was nevertheless an ardent admirer, and believed that Jesus's Beatitudes informed his own humanist outlook.^[58] While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God.^[48] Despite describing freethought, humanism and agnosticism as his "ancestral religion," and despite being a Unitarian, he also spoke of himself as being irreligious.^[48] A press release by the American Humanist Association described him as "completely secular."^[55]

Self-assessment[link]

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. He wrote an earlier version of writing tips that was even more straightforward and contained only seven rules (though it advised using Elements of Style for more indepth advice).

In "The Sexual Revolution", Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday, Vonnegut grades his own works. He states that the grades "do not place me in literary history" and that he is comparing "myself with myself." The grades are as follows:

• Player Piano: B
• The Sirens of Titan: A
• Mother Night: A
• Cat's Cradle: A-plus
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
• Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
• Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
• Breakfast of Champions: C
• Slapstick: D
• Jailbird: A
• Palm Sunday: C

Appearances[link]

• Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986's Back to School, in which he is hired by Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
• Vonnegut also made brief cameos in the film adaptations of his novels Mother Night and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night was directed by Keith Gordon, who starred as Dangerfield's son in Back to School.
• He made a guest appearance on the 2002 DVD released by 1 Giant Leap, leading the producers of the film to say, "Probably the most unbelievable result in our whole production was getting Kurt Vonnegut to agree to an interview". In the film, Vonnegut states, "Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference".
• Vonnegut narrates and wrote the narrative of two oratorios with composer Dave Soldier recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, A Soldier's Story based on the execution of Private Eddie Slovik and Ice-9 Ballads, adapted from Cat's Cradle.
• Vonnegut recorded a number of first-person voice-overs for Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War and included one of a young soldier reflecting on a visit with a prostitute.
• Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 dramatic documentary The American Ruling Class playing himself.
• Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 Dutch release of the three part BBC documentary D-Day to Berlin. The allies journey to victory, telling about his memories of the bombing of Dresden
• In August 2006, Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed on the national, weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, from inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. The program made broadcast history^[59] as the first to be taped inside a virtual world, and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind's John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped. Vonnegut's virtual interview was taped in front of a virtual audience of 100 people from around the world at the 16-acre (65,000 m²) virtual broadcast center created by producer Bill Lichtenstein and Lichtenstein Creative Media^[60] which produces The Infinite Mind.
• In 2007 Vonnegut is featured in the film Never Down as Robert and appears in several scenes.

Tributes[link]

• A sort of anti-tribute appears in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Inferno, which is set in Dante's Hell. The protagonist, a version of Niven himself, encounters Vonnegut's tomb in the city of Dis; another character theorizes it is punishment for Vonnegut's satire of religion in several of his stories. The protagonist utters bitter criticism of Vonnegut's talent, but it is not clear whether it should be seen as actual criticism of Vonnegut or of the character's own ego.
• The 2009 Hollywood adaptation of Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", a film entitled 2081 is dedicated "To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."
• At the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis, on April 27, 2007, where Vonnegut was being honored posthumously, his son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, and which was reported as the last thing he wrote. It ends with this: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."^[61]
• Filmmaker Michael Moore included Vonnegut in the dedications for his 2007 film Sicko; at the end of the film, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" appear on the screen.
• The satirical newspaper The Onion contained a tribute to Vonnegut soon after he died, with a reference to his work Slaughterhouse-Five stating that he shouldn't be referred to as dead "without checking Dresden for his younger self first."^[62]
• On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, reintroduced Kurt's Mile High Malt to celebrate the late author's birthday.^[63] The beer was originally created by Vonnegut's grandfather, Albert Lieber, of the Indianapolis Brewery, using coffee as the secret ingredient. Kurt's Mile High Malt was first brewed in 1996 thanks to Wynkoop Founder and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a friend of Vonnegut's. At Vonnegut's request, coffee was added to the Mile High Malt, making it a close recreation of his grandfather's original.
• When Vonnegut died, members of the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York lowered the American flag to half staff, hung the funeral shroud, and rang a fire bell in accordance with the traditional 5-5-5 alarm used to honor fallen brothers. Vonnegut's name still appears on an old active fire-fighters roster, located next to a screen-print that he donated to the department.
• The Elam McKnight& Bob Bogdal album Zombie Nation includes a song entitled "Hocus Pocus" which is a homage to Kurt Vonnegut and is written from the first person perspective of the main character in the novel Hocus Pocus.
• Guitarist Joe Satriani wrote his song Ice 9 about the fictional substance from Cat's Cradle

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Farrell, Susan (August 2008), Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Facts on File, ISBN 0-8160-6598-5 

• Shields, Charles. (2011). And So It Goes:Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-8693-5.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kurt Vonnegut

• Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website
• The Kurt Vonnegut Society
• Kurt Vonnegut papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington
• Kurt Vonnegut at the Internet Movie Database

This article may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. You can improve the article by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (September 2009)

H. P. Lovecraft
File:Lovecraft1934.jpg H. P. Lovecraft, circa 1934.
Born	Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-08-20)August 20, 1890 Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Died	March 15, 1937(1937-03-15) (aged 46) Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Resting place	Swan Point Cemetery, Providence
Pen name	Lewis Theobold, Humphrey Littlewit, Ward Phillips, Edward Softly
Occupation	Short story writer, Editor, Novelist, Poet
Nationality	United States
Genres	Horror, science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, Gothic fiction
Literary movement	Cosmicism, Weird fiction
Notable work(s)	"The Call of Cthulhu", The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness
Spouse(s)	Sonia Greene (1883-1972)
Influences Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, A. Merritt, Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Hope Hodgson, Augustan literature
Influenced Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Jorge Luis Borges, Peter Straub, Clark Ashton Smith, Michel Houellebecq, Graham Harman, Rikki Ducornet, Robert E. Howard, Ramsey Campbell, Alan Moore, Gene Wolfe, China Mieville, George R. R. Martin, Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley, Caitlin R. Kiernan, S.T. Joshi
Signature

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.^[1]

Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror", the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind. As such, his stories express a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs. Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.^[2]

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his lifetime, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft—as with Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century—has exerted "an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction".^[3] Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."^[4][5] King has even made it clear in his semi-autobiographical non-fiction book Danse Macabre that Lovecraft was responsible for King's own fascination with horror and the macabre, and was the single largest figure to influence his fiction writing.^[6] His stories have also been adapted into plays, films and games.

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, at 9:00 a.m. in his family home at 194 (later 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. (The house was torn down in 1961.) He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. His parents married, the first marriage for both, when they were in their thirties, unusually late in life given the time period. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a Chicago hotel room while on a business trip. The elder Lovecraft was taken back to Providence and placed in Butler Hospital, where he remained until his death in 1898. Lovecraft maintained throughout his life that his father had died in a condition of paralysis brought on by "nervous exhaustion" due to over-work, but it is now almost certain that the actual cause was paresis due to syphilis.^[7] It is unknown whether the younger Lovecraft was ever aware of the actual nature of his father's illness or its cause, although his mother likely was.

Lovecraft at approximately age nine

After his father's hospitalization, Lovecraft was raised by his mother, his two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, an American businessman. All five resided together in the family home. Lovecraft was a prodigy, reciting poetry at the age of three and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred the boy's interest in the weird by telling him his own original tales of Gothic horror.

Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child. Due to his sickly condition, he barely attended school until he was eight years old, and then was withdrawn after a year. He read voraciously during this period and became especially enamored of chemistry and astronomy. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette. Four years later, he returned to public school at Hope High School (Rhode Island). Beginning in his early life, Lovecraft is believed to have suffered from night terrors, a rare parasomnia disorder; he believed himself to be assaulted at night by horrific "night gaunts." Much of his later work is thought to have been directly inspired by these terrors. (Indeed, Night Gaunts became the subject of a poem he wrote of the same name, in which they were personified as devil-like creatures without faces.)

His grandfather's death in 1904 greatly affected Lovecraft's life. Mismanagement of his grandfather's estate left his family in a poor financial situation and they were forced to move into much smaller accommodations at 598 (now a duplex at 598-600) Angell Street. In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he himself claimed to have suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate). S. T. Joshi suggests in his biography of Lovecraft that a primary cause for this breakdown was his difficulty in higher mathematics, a subject he needed to master to become a professional astronomer.

Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but, from 1908 until 1913, his output was primarily poetry. During that time, he lived a hermit's existence, having almost no contact with anyone but his mother. This changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories of one of the publication's popular writers, Fred Jackson.^[8] The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join them in 1914. The UAPA reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays. In 1917, at the prodding of correspondents, he returned to fiction with more polished stories, such as "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The latter was his first professionally-published work, appearing in W. Paul Cook's The Vagrant (November, 1919) and Weird Tales in 1923. Around that time, he began to build up a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch (Psycho), Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series).

In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother was committed to Butler Hospital just as her husband had been. Nevertheless, she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained very close until her death on May 24, 1921, the result of complications from gall bladder surgery.

Marriage and New York[link]

A few weeks after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924, and the couple relocated to Brooklyn and moved into her apartment. Lovecraft's aunts may have been unhappy with this arrangement, as they were not fond of Lovecraft being married to a tradeswoman (Greene owned a hat shop). Initially, Lovecraft was enthralled by New York, but soon the couple were facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both, so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to dislike New York life intensely.^[9] Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he employed in the short story "The Horror at Red Hook".^[10]

A few years later, Lovecraft and his wife, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed. He returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.

Return to Providence[link]

Lovecraft’s final home from May 1933 until March 10, 1937

Original Phillips family gravestone bearing H.P. Lovecraft's name

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street until 1933. The same address is given as the home of Dr. Willett in Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The period after his return to Providence — the last decade of his life — was Lovecraft's most prolific. In that time he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales), as well as longer efforts, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing, including "The Mound", "Winged Death", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" and for Harry Houdini "Under the Pyramids" (also known as "Imprisoned With the Pharaohs").

Lovecraft considered himself a "New Deal Democrat", and was an ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His political views can be considered as "moderately socialist."^[11]

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by his former correspondent Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestine,^[12] and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence.

Gravestone of H. P. Lovecraft

In accordance with his lifelong scientific curiosity, he kept a diary of his illness until close to the moment of his death.

Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument (41°51′14″N 71°22′52″W / 41.8540176°N 71.3810921°W / 41.8540176; -71.3810921). That was not enough for his fans, so in 1977 a group of them raised the money to buy him a headstone of his own in Swan Point cemetery, on which they had inscribed Lovecraft's name, the dates of his birth and death, and the phrase "I AM PROVIDENCE", a line from one of his personal letters.

Themes[link]

This section may contain previously unpublished synthesis of published material that conveys ideas not attributable to the original sources. See the talk page for details. (February 2009)

Several themes recur in Lovecraft's stories:

Forbidden knowledge[link]

The central theme in most of Lovecraft's works is that of forbidden knowledge.^[14] Some critics argue that this theme is a reflection of Lovecraft's contempt of the world around him, causing him to search inwardly for knowledge and inspiration.^[15] In Lovecraft's works the search for forbidden knowledge drives many of the main characters. In most of his works this knowledge proves Promethean in nature either filling the seeker with regret from what they have learned, destroying them psychically, or completely destroying the person who holds the knowledge.^{[14][16][17][18][19][20]}

Non-human influences on humanity[link]

The beings of Lovecraft's mythos often have human (or mostly human) servants; Cthulhu, for instance, is worshipped under various names by cults amongst both the Eskimos of Greenland and voodoo circles of Louisiana, and in many other parts of the world.

These worshippers served a useful narrative purpose for Lovecraft. Many beings of the Mythos were too powerful to be defeated by human opponents, and so horrific that direct knowledge of them meant insanity for the victim. When dealing with such beings, Lovecraft needed a way to provide exposition and build tension without bringing the story to a premature end. Human followers gave him a way to reveal information about their "gods" in a diluted form, and also made it possible for his protagonists to win paltry victories. Lovecraft, like his contemporaries, envisioned "savages" as closer to the Earth, only in Lovecraft's case, this meant, so to speak, closer to Cthulhu.

Inherited guilt[link]

Another recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is the idea that descendants in a bloodline can never escape the stain of crimes committed by their forebears, at least if the crimes are atrocious enough. Descendants may be very far removed, both in place and in time (and, indeed, in culpability), from the act itself, and yet, they may be haunted by the revenant past, e.g. "The Rats in the Walls", "The Lurking Fear", "Arthur Jermyn", "The Alchemist", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward".

Fate[link]

Often in Lovecraft's works the protagonist is not in control of his own actions, or finds it impossible to change course. Many of his characters would be free from danger if they simply managed to run away; however, this possibility either never arises or is somehow curtailed by some outside force, such as in "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Dreams in the Witch House". Often his characters are subject to a compulsive influence from powerful malevolent or indifferent beings. As with the inevitability of one's ancestry, eventually even running away, or death itself, provides no safety ("The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Outsider", The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, etc.). In some cases, this doom is manifest in the entirety of humanity, and no escape is possible ("The Shadow Out of Time").

Civilization under threat[link]

Lovecraft was familiar with the work of the German conservative-revolutionary theorist Oswald Spengler, whose pessimistic thesis of the decadence of the modern West formed a crucial element in Lovecraft's overall anti-modern worldview. Spenglerian imagery of cyclical decay is present in particular in At the Mountains of Madness. S. T. Joshi, in H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, places Spengler at the center of his discussion of Lovecraft's political and philosophical ideas.^[21]

Lovecraft wrote to Clark Ashton Smith in 1927: "It is my belief, and was so long before Spengler put his seal of scholarly proof on it, that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank decadence".^[22] Lovecraft was also acquainted with the writings of another German philosopher of decadence: Friedrich Nietzsche.^[23]

Lovecraft frequently dealt with the idea of civilization struggling against dark, primitive barbarism. In some stories this struggle is at an individual level; many of his protagonists are cultured, highly-educated men who are gradually corrupted by some obscure and feared influence.

In such stories, the "curse" is often a hereditary one, either because of interbreeding with non-humans (e.g., "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920), "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931) or through direct magical influence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Physical and mental degradation often come together; this theme of 'tainted blood' may represent concerns relating to Lovecraft's own family history, particularly the death of his father due to what Lovecraft must have suspected to be a syphilitic disorder.

In other tales, an entire society is threatened by barbarism. Sometimes the barbarism comes as an external threat, with a civilized race destroyed in war (e.g., "Polaris"). Sometimes, an isolated pocket of humanity falls into decadence and atavism of its own accord (e.g., "The Lurking Fear"). But most often, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a malevolent underclass influenced by inhuman forces.

There is a lack of analysis as to whether England's gradual loss of prominence and related conflicts (Boer War, India, World War I) had an influence on Lovecraft's worldview. It is likely that the "roaring twenties" left Lovecraft disillusioned as he was still obscure and struggling with the basic necessities of daily life, combined with seeing non-European immigrants in New York City.

Race, ethnicity, and class[link]

Racism is the most controversial aspect of Lovecraft’s works which “does not endear Lovecraft to the modern reader” and comes across through many disparaging remarks against the various non-Anglo-Saxon races and cultures within his work. Lovecraft did not seem to hold all White people in high regard, but rather he held English people and people of English descent above all others.^[24][25][26] While his racist perspective is undeniable, some critics argue that it does not necessarily detract from his ability to create compelling philosophical worlds which have inspired many artists and readers.^[12][26] In his writings and personal life he argued for a strong color line for the purpose of preserving race and culture.^{[12][24][25][27]} These arguments occurred either through direct statements against different races in his work and personal correspondence,^{[10][12][24][25][26]} or allegorically in his work using non-human races.^{[17][24][28][29]} Reading Lovecraft's work, his racial attitude was seen as more cultural than biological, showing sympathy to others who assimilated into the western culture and even marrying a Jewish woman whom he viewed as "well assimilated".^{[12][24][25][29]} While Lovecraft's racial attitude has been seen as directly influenced by the time, a reflection of the New England society he grew up in,^{[24][25][26][30][31]} this racism appeared stronger than the popular viewpoints held at that time.^[26][29] Some researchers note that his views failed to change in the face of increased social change of that time which invalidated many of his strongly held views.^[12][24]

Risks of a scientific era[link]

At the turn of the 20th century, man's increased reliance upon science was both opening new worlds and solidifying the manners by which he could understand them. Lovecraft portrays this potential for a growing gap of man's understanding of the universe as a potential for horror. Most notably in "The Colour Out of Space", the inability of science to comprehend a contaminated meteorite leads to horror.

In a letter to James F. Morton in 1923, Lovecraft specifically points to Einstein's theory on relativity as throwing the world into chaos and making the cosmos a jest. And in a 1929 letter to Woodburn Harris, he speculates that technological comforts risk the collapse of science. Indeed, at a time when men viewed science as limitless and powerful, Lovecraft imagined alternative potential and fearful outcomes. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft's characters encounter architecture which is "abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours".^[32] Non-Euclidean geometry is the mathematical language and background of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and Lovecraft references it repeatedly in exploring alien archaeology.

Religion[link]

Lovecraft's works are ruled by several distinct pantheons of deities who are either indifferent or actively hostile to humanity. Several, particularly those of the Cthulhu Mythos, indulge upon alternate mythic human origins in contrast to those found in the creation stories of existing religions, expanding on a natural world view. Protagonist characters are usually educated men, citing scientific and rationalist evidence to support their non-faith. Herbert West–Reanimator, reflects on the atheism common within academic circles. In "The Silver Key", the character Randolph Carter attempts after losing access to dreams to seek solace in religion, specifically Congregationalism, but does not find it and ultimately loses faith.

Lovecraft himself adopted the stance of atheism early in his life. In 1932 he wrote in a letter to Robert E. Howard: "All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."^[33]

Influences on Lovecraft[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

Some of Lovecraft's work was inspired by nightmares of his own. As he studied many scientific advances of biology, astronomy, geology, and physics, Lovecraft was more and more confounded and fueled his skepticism on humanity. His interest started from his childhood days when his grandfather would tell him Gothic horror stories. The influence of Arthur Machen, with his carefully constructed tales concerning the survival of ancient evil into modern times in an otherwise realistic world and his beliefs in hidden mysteries which lay behind reality, looms large.

Lovecraft was also influenced by authors such as Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who, writing as Francis Stevens, impressed Lovecraft enough that he publicly praised her stories and eventually "emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes"), Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers (writer of The King in Yellow, of whom Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans — equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them").

The biggest influence was Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft had many similarities with Poe; they both lost their fathers at a young age, loved poetry, and used archaisms (language pertaining to an earlier generation) in their writing. They both went against the contemporary styles and created their own worlds of fantasy.

Furthermore, Lovecraft's discovery of the stories of Lord Dunsany with their pantheon of mighty gods existing in dreamlike outer realms, moved his writing in a new direction, resulting in a series of imitative fantasies in a 'Dreamlands' setting.

Another inspiration came from a totally different kind of source; the scientific progress at the time in such diverse areas as biology, astronomy, geology, and physics, all contributed to make Lovecraft see the human race seem even more insignificant, powerless, and doomed in a materialistic and mechanical universe. Lovecraft's materialist views led his fiction to espouse his philosophical views; his fiction therefore consists of a stance or worldview which may be termed cosmicism. Lovecraft was a keen amateur astronomer from his youth, often visiting the Ladd Observatory in Providence, and penning numerous astronomical articles for local newspapers. His astronomical telescope is now housed in the rooms of the August Derleth Society.

This took on a dark tone with the creation of what is today often called the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of alien extra-dimensional deities and horrors which predate humanity, and which are hinted at in aeon-old myths and legends. The term "Cthulhu Mythos" was coined by Lovecraft's correspondent and fellow author, August Derleth, after Lovecraft's death; Lovecraft jocularly referred to his artificial mythology as "Yog-Sothothery".

Lovecraft considered himself a man best suited to the early 18th century. His writing style, especially in his many letters, owes much to Augustan British writers of the Enlightenment like Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift.

He also cited Algernon Blackwood as an influence, quoting The Centaur in the head paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. He also declares Blackwood's "The Willows" to be the single best piece of weird fiction ever written.^[34]

Among the books found in his library (as evidenced in Lovecraft's Library by S. T. Joshi) was "The Seven Who Were Hanged" by Leonid Andreyev and "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" by James De Mille.

Lovecraft's style has often been criticised by unsympathetic critics, yet scholars such as S. T. Joshi have shown that Lovecraft consciously utilised a variety of literary devices to form a unique style of his own - these include conscious archaism, prose-poetic techniques combined with essay-form techniques, alliteration, anaphora, crescendo, transferred epithet, metaphor, symbolism and colloquialism.

Lovecraft's influence on culture[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Plaque at 22 Prospect Street.

Lovecraft was relatively unknown during his own time. While his stories appeared in the pages of prominent pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (eliciting letters of outrage as often as letters of praise from regular readers of the magazines), not many people knew his name. He did, however, correspond regularly with other contemporary writers, such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, people who became good friends of his, even though they never met in person. This group of writers became known as the "Lovecraft Circle", since they all freely borrowed elements of Lovecraft's stories – the mysterious books with disturbing names, the pantheon of ancient alien entities, such as Cthulhu and Azathoth, and eldritch places, such as the New England town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University – for use in their own works (with Lovecraft's blessing and encouragement).

After Lovecraft's death, the Lovecraft Circle carried on. August Derleth in particular added to and expanded on Lovecraft's vision. However, Derleth's contributions have been controversial, to say the least; while Lovecraft never considered his pantheon of alien gods more than a mere plot device, Derleth created an entire cosmology, complete with a war between the "good" "Elder Gods" and the "evil" "Outer Gods" (such as Cthulhu and his ilk), which the "good" Gods were supposed to have won, locking Cthulhu and others up beneath the earth, in the ocean etc. Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories went on to associate different gods with the traditional four elements of fire, air, earth and water - an artificial constraint which required justificatory contortions on Derleth's part since Lovecraft himself never envisioned such a scheme.

Lovecraft's fiction has been grouped into three categories by some critics. While Lovecraft did not refer to these categories himself, he did once write, "There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' – but alas – where are any Lovecraft pieces?"^[35]

• Macabre stories (approximately 1905–1920)
• Dream Cycle stories (approximately 1920–1927)
• Cthulhu Mythos/Lovecraft Mythos stories (approximately 1925–1935)

H. P. Lovecraft is now noted as a significant figure in 20th-century horror fiction. His writing, particularly the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos", has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements can be found in novels, films, movies, music, video games, comic books (e.g. the use of Arkham Insane Asylum in The Batman comic book series), and even cartoons. Many modern horror and fantasy writers, including Stephen King, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Alan Moore, Junji Ito, F. Paul Wilson, Brian Lumley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Neil Gaiman, have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences. Beyond direct adaptation, Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture and have been praised by many modern writers. Some influence was direct, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many of his contemporaries, such as August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. Many later figures were influenced by Lovecraft's works, including author and artist Clive Barker, prolific horror writer Stephen King, comics writers Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola, film directors John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and Guillermo Del Toro, horror manga artist Junji Ito, and artist H. R. Giger.^[36]

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote his short story There Are More Things in memory of Lovecraft. Contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq wrote a literary biography of Lovecraft called H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction for a collection of Lovecraft stories. The Library of America published a volume of Lovecraft's work in 2005, essentially declaring him a canonical American writer.^[37][38][39] French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari made reference to Lovecraft in A Thousand Plateaus and called the short story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" one of his masterpieces.^[40]

He has also been a significant influence on speculative realism, a recent continental philosophy movement,^[41] with admirers from Graham Harman (who has connected the cognitive style of Husserl to Lovecraft and has developed what he describes as "weird realism") to Iranian writer Reza Negarestani.^[42][43]

In music, examples of Lovecraftian influence include the psychedelic rock band H. P. Lovecraft (who shortened their name to Lovecraft and then Love Craft in the 1970s) who released the H. P. Lovecraft and H. P. Lovecraft II albums in 1967 and 1968 respectively. The drum and bass artist Zardonic has an album titled "Lovecraft Machine" ^[44] and a song named after the fictional monster Cthulhu. The metal band Metallica who recorded a song inspired by "The Call of Cthulhu", an instrumental entitled "The Call of Ktulu",^[45] a song based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth titled "The Thing That Should Not Be",^[46] and a song based on Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos", titled "All Nightmare Long";^[47] Black Sabbath's "Behind the Wall of Sleep", which appeared on their 1970 debut album and is based on Lovecraft's short story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"; The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets whose entire repertoire is Lovecraft-based; The Mountain Goats song called "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" on their 2008 album Heretic Pride; black metal band Nehëmah has songs inspired by Lovecraft including "Creeping Chaos", "The Great Old Ones", "Dead But Dreaming in the Eternal Icy Waste", and "The Elder Gods Awakening" on their 2004 album Requiem Tenebrae; melodic death metal band The Black Dahlia Murder also has produced several songs based on the Cthulhu Mythos, "Throne of Lunacy" and "Thy Horror Cosmic"; progressive metal band Dream Theater's song "The Dark Eternal Night" is based on the story "Nyarlathotep" by Lovecraft; Morbid Angel also features songs that uses the Mythos; Mark E Smith, lead singer of The Fall, is a known fan of Lovecraft's work, and the song "Spectre Vs Rector", a ghost story, contains the lyric "Yog Sothoth rape me lord"; and UK anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni make repeated references in their song titles, lyrics and artwork, including the album Cacophony, all 30 songs of which are inspired by the life and writings of Lovecraft.^[48] Doom metal band Catacombs has an album based on Lovecraft called In the Depths of R'lyeh. In the Iron Maiden album Live After Death, the band mascot, Eddie, is rising from a grave, where can be read "H.P. Lovecraft" and a quote from The Nameless City: "That is not dead which can eternal lie yet with strange aeons even death may die."

The Lovecraftian world has also made its mark on gaming. Chaosium first made its mark as a publisher of games based on Lovecraft's Mythos. The role-playing game Call of Cthulhu has been in print for 30 years (currently in its sixth major edition) and has garnered consistent praise for the high quality of its campaign and adventure supplements. Two collectible card games are Mythos and Call of Cthulhu, the Living Card Game. In the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game the Arcana Force archetype is based on his works. Several video games are based on or influenced heavily by Lovecraft such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice, Shadowman, Alone in the Dark, Chzo Mythos, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dead Space, Splatterhouse, Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage, Penumbra, and Quake. Also, whilst not always Lovecraft based at their essence, references to his work are frequent in other games such as Fallout 3, Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, World of Warcraft,^[49] and Blood.

Lovecraft as a character in fiction[link]

Aside from his thinly-veiled appearance in Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars", Lovecraft continues to be used as a character in supernatural fiction. Examples include:

• Bradbury, Ray: In an early version of the story "The Exiles", published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1 No. 2 (Winter-Spring 1950), and later to become part of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Bradbury uses Lovecraft as a character, making a brief (600-word) appearance, eating ice cream in front of a fire and complaining about how cold he is. The passage was excised from all subsequent versions of the story.
• Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea: "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" (1975). Lovecraft and his works are discussed at length in the first book, The Eye in the Pyramid. Lovecraft makes an in-person appearance in the second book, The Golden Apple, where he first converses with Robert Putney Drake about the occult dimensions of his work. Lovecraft's aunt, Annie Gamwell, and his acquaintance, Hart Crane, also make appearances as characters in the trilogy.
• Lupoff, Richard A.: Lovecraft's Book (1985).
• H.P. Lovecraft's: Necronomicon (1993).
• Barbour, David and Richard Raleigh. Shadows Bend (2000).
• Cannon, Peter. The Lovecraft Chronicles (2004).
• Stargate SG-1: Roswell, where Lovecraft encounters and assists time-traveling team SG-1, one of whom's stories are the basis for his novels (2007).

Survey of the work[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

For most of the 20th century, the definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction were published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a considerable amount of other literature as well. Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft's works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. They collect the standard texts as edited by S. T. Joshi, most of which were available in the Arkham House editions, with the exception of the restored text of "The Shadow Out of Time" from The Dreams in the Witch House, which had been previously released by small-press publisher Hippocampus Press. In 2005 the prestigious Library of America canonized Lovecraft with a volume of his stories edited by Peter Straub, and Random House's Modern Library line have issued the "definitive edition" of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (also including "Supernatural Horror in Literature").

Lovecraft's poetry is collected in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Night Shade Books, 2001), while much of his juvenilia, various essays on philosophical, political and literary topics, antiquarian travelogues, and other things, can be found in Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House, 1989). Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", first published in 1927, is a historical survey of horror literature available with endnotes as The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Letters[link]

Although Lovecraft is known mostly for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history.

He sometimes dated his letters 200 years before the current date, which would have put the writing back in U.S. colonial times, before the American Revolution (a war which offended his Anglophilia). He explained that he thought that the 18th and 20th centuries were the "best"; the former being a period of noble grace, and the latter a century of science.

Lovecraft was not a very active letter-writer in youth. In 1931 he admitted: "In youth I scarcely did any letter-writing — thanking anybody for a present was so much of an ordeal that I would rather have written a two hundred fifty-line pastoral or a twenty-page treatise on the rings of Saturn." (SL 3.369–70). The initial interest in letters stemmed from his correspondence with his cousin Phillips Gamwell but even more important was his involvement in the amateur journalism movement, which was initially responsible for the enormous number of letters Lovecraft produced.

Despite his light letter-writing in youth, in later life his correspondence was so voluminous that it has been estimated that he may have written around 30,000 letters to various correspondents, a figure which places him second only to Voltaire as an epistolarian. Lovecraft's later correspondence is primarily to fellow weird fiction writers, rather than to the amateur journalist friends of his earlier years.

Lovecraft clearly states that his contact to numerous different people through letter-writing was one of the main factors in broadening his view of the world: "I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge." (SL 4.389).

Today there are five publishing houses that have released letters from Lovecraft, most prominently Arkham House with its five-volume edition Selected Letters. (Those volumes, however, severely abridge the letters they contain). Other publishers are Hippocampus Press (Letters to Alfred Galpin et al.), Night Shade Books (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei et al..), Necronomicon Press (Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett et al.), and University of Tampa Press (O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft's Letters to R. H. Barlow). S.T. Joshi is supervising an ongoing series of volumes collecting Lovecraft's unabridged letters to particular correspondents.

Ohio University Press also published "Lord of a Visible World — An Autobiography in Letters" in 2000 which presents his letters according to themes, such as adolescence and travel. It was edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.

Copyright[link]

There is controversy over the copyright status of many of Lovecraft's works, especially his later works. Lovecraft had specified that the young R. H. Barlow would serve as executor of his literary estate,^[50] but these instructions had not been incorporated into his will. Nevertheless his surviving aunt carried out his expressed wishes, and Barlow was given charge of the massive and complex literary estate upon Lovecraft's death.

Barlow deposited the bulk of the papers, including the voluminous correspondence, with the John Hay Library, and attempted to organize and maintain Lovecraft's other writing. August Derleth, an older and more established writer than Barlow, vied for control of the literary estate. One result of these conflicts was the legal confusion over who owned what copyrights.

All works published before 1923 are public domain in the U.S.^[51] However, there is some disagreement over who exactly owns or owned the copyrights and whether the copyrights apply to the majority of Lovecraft's works published post-1923.

Questions center over whether copyrights for Lovecraft's works were ever renewed under the terms of the United States Copyright Act of 1976 for works created prior to January 1, 1978. The problem comes from the fact that before the Copyright Act of 1976 the number of years a work was copyrighted in the U.S. was based on publication rather than life of the author plus a certain number of years and that it was good for only 28 years. After that point, a new copyright had to be filed, and any work that did not have its copyright renewed fell back into the public domain. The Copyright Act of 1976 retroactively extended this renewal period for all works to a period of 47 years^[52] and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20 years to that, for a total of 95 years from publication. If the works were renewed, the copyrights would still be valid in the United States.

The European Union Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection of 1993 extended the copyrights to 70 years after the author's death. So, all works of Lovecraft published during his lifetime, became public domain in all 27 European Union countries on 1 January 2008. In those Berne Convention countries who have implemented only the minimum copyright period, copyright expires 50 years after the author's death.

Lovecraft protégés and part owners of Arkham House, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, often claimed copyrights over Lovecraft's works. On October 9, 1947, Derleth purchased all rights to Weird Tales. However, since April 1926 at the latest, Lovecraft had reserved all second printing rights to stories published in Weird Tales. Hence, Weird Tales may only have owned the rights to at most six of Lovecraft's tales. Again, even if Derleth did obtain the copyrights to Lovecraft's tales, no evidence as yet has been found that the copyrights were renewed.^[53]

S. T. Joshi concludes in his biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, that Derleth's claims are "almost certainly fictitious" and that most of Lovecraft's works published in the amateur press are most likely now in the public domain. The copyright for Lovecraft's works would have been inherited by the only surviving heir of his 1912 will: Lovecraft's aunt, Annie Gamwell. Gamwell herself perished in 1941 and the copyrights then passed to her remaining descendants, Ethel Phillips Morrish and Edna Lewis. Morrish and Lewis then signed a document, sometimes referred to as the Morrish-Lewis gift, permitting Arkham House to republish Lovecraft's works but retaining the copyrights for themselves. Searches of the Library of Congress have failed to find any evidence that these copyrights were then renewed after the 28-year period and, hence, it is likely that these works are now in the public domain.

Chaosium, publishers of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, have a trademark on the phrase "The Call of Cthulhu" for use in game products. Another RPG publisher, TSR, Inc., original publisher of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, included in one of that game's earlier supplements, Deities & Demigods (originally published in 1980 and later renamed to "Legends & Lore"), a section on the Cthulhu Mythos; TSR, Inc. later agreed to remove this section at Chaosium's request.

Regardless of the legal disagreements surrounding Lovecraft's works, Lovecraft himself was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos. He actively encouraged other writers to reference his creations, such as the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. After his death, many writers have contributed stories and enriched the shared mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as making numerous references to his work. (See Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture.)

Locations featured in Lovecraft stories[link]

Lovecraft drew extensively from his native New England for settings in his fiction. Numerous real historical locations are mentioned, and several fictional New England locations make frequent appearances. (See Lovecraft Country.)

Historical locations[link]

• Pascoag, Rhode Island in The Horror at Red Hook
• Chepachet, Rhode Island in The Horror at Red Hook
• Gainesville, Florida in The Statement of Randolph Carter
• Binger in Caddo County, Oklahoma (The Mound)
• Copp's Hill, Boston, Massachusetts
• Red Line (MBTA)
• Pawtuxet (now Cranston, Rhode Island)
• Newburyport, Massachusetts
• Ipswich, Massachusetts
• Dunedin, New Zealand
• Bolton, Massachusetts
• Salem, Massachusetts
• Brattleboro, Vermont
• Albany, New York
• Many locations within his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, including the (then purportedly haunted) Halsey House, Prospect Terrace and Brown University's John Hay Library and John Carter Brown Library.
• Danvers State Hospital, in Danvers, Massachusetts, which is largely believed to have served as inspiration for the infamous Arkham sanatorium from "The Thing on the Doorstep".
• Catskill Mountains, New York
• New York City, New York
• Mainalo Mountain, Arcadia, Greece
• Tegea, Arcadia, Greece
• Kilderry, Ireland
• Nome, Alaska
• Noatak, Alaska
• Fort Morton, Alaska, in "The Horror in the Museum"
• New Orleans, Louisiana, in "The Call of Cthulhu", including a mention of Tulane University.
• Newport, Rhode Island

Fictional locations[link]

• Miskatonic University in the fictional Arkham, Massachusetts
• Dunwich, Massachusetts
• Innsmouth, Massachusetts
• Kingsport, Massachusetts
• Aylesbury, Massachusetts
• Martin's Beach
• The Miskatonic River
• The fictional Central University Library at the real University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. According to Lovecraft there is a copy of the Necronomicon here, but the University of Buenos Aires never had a central library.

Bibliography[link]

Further reading[link]

• The Strange Sound of Cthulhu: Music Inspired by the Writings of H. P. Lovecraft (ISBN 978-1-84728-776-2), written by Gary Hill.
• Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (ISBN 0-8131-1728-3), by Donald R. Burleson, PhD, a longtime scholar on Lovecraft and acquaintance of S. T. Joshi, is probably the only book analyzing Lovecraft's literature from a deconstructionist standpoint. University Press of Kentucky, November 1990.
• The Gentleman From Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft ( ISBN 978-0-9701699-1-4), written by Muriel and C. M. Eddy, Jr. is a collection of personal remembrances and anecdotes from two of Lovecraft's closest friends in Providence. The Eddys were fellow writers, and Mr. Eddy was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales.
• Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (ISBN 0-586-04166-4), written by Lin Carter in 1972, is a survey of Lovecraft's work (along with that of other members of the Lovecraft Circle) with considerable information on his life.
• The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos by S. T. Joshi (Mythos Books, 2008) is the first full-length critical study since Lin Carter's to examine the development of Lovecraft's Mythos and its outworking in the oeuvres of various modern writers.
• The first full-length biography was Lovecraft: a Biography (ISBN 0-345-25115-6), written by L. Sprague de Camp; published in 1975, it is now out of print.
• Frank Belknap Long's Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (Arkham House, 1975, ISBN 0-87054-068-8) presents a more personal look at Lovecraft's life, combining reminiscence, biography and literary criticism. Long was a friend and correspondent of Lovecraft, as well as a fellow fantasist who wrote a number of Lovecraft-influenced Cthulhu Mythos stories (including The Hounds of Tindalos).
• A newer, more extensive biography is H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (ISBN 0-940884-88-7) written by Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi. An alternative is Joshi's abridged A Dreamer & A Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time (ISBN 0-85323-946-0). An unabridged reprint in two volumes of Joshi's biography, newly retitled I Am Providence:", was published in 2010 by Hippocampus Press.
• An English translation of Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (ISBN 1-932416-18-8) was published by Believer Books in 2005.
• Other significant Lovecraft-related works are An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by Joshi and David S. Schulz; Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue (a meticulous listing of many of the books in Lovecraft's now scattered library), by Joshi; Lovecraft at Last, an account by Willis Conover of his teenage correspondence with Lovecraft; Joshi's A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft.
• Andrew Migliore and John Strysik's Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft and Charles P. Mitchell's The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography both discuss films containing Lovecraftian elements.
• Lovecraft's prose fiction has been published numerous times. The corrected texts were released by Arkham House in the 1980s, and many other collections of his stories have appeared, including Ballantine Books editions and three popular Del Rey editions. The three collections published by Penguin, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, incorporate the modifications made in the corrected texts as well as the annotations provided by Joshi.
• Lovecraft's ghost-written works are compiled in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, edited again by Joshi.
• Some of Lovecraft's writings are annotated with footnotes or endnotes. In addition to the Penguin editions mentioned above and The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, Joshi has produced The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft as well as More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, both of which are footnoted extensively.
• An Epicure in the Terrible (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi is an anthology of 13 essays on Lovecraft (excluding Joshi's lengthy introduction)on the centennial of Lovecraft's birth. The essays are arranged into 3 sections; Biographical, Thematic Studies and Comparative and Genre Studies. The authors include S. T. Joshi, Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, Jason C. Eckhardt, Will Murray, Donald R. Burleson, Peter Cannon, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Steven J. Mariconda, David E. Schultz, Robert H. Waugh, Robert M. Price, R. Boerem, Norman R. Gatford and Barton Levi St. Armand.
• “H. P. Lovecraft: Alone in Space,” chapter 3 in Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry by S. T. Joshi (Sydney: P’rea Press, 2008: ISBN 978-0-9804625-3-1 (pbk) and ISBN 978-0-9804625-4-8 (hbk)), discusses some of Lovecraft's weird poetry.
• The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko edited by Amy H. Sturgis and David D. Oberhelman (Mythopoeic Press, 2009: ISBN 978-1-887726-12-2).
• Poole, W. Scott. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-60258-314-6.
• Anderson, James Arthur. Out of the Shadows: a structuralist approach to understanding the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (The Milford Series, Popular Writers of Today, Vol. 75 Wildside Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8095-3002-1 A close reading of Lovecraft's fiction.

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Find more about H. P. Lovecraft on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

• H. P. Lovecraft at the Internet Movie Database
• The H.P. Lovecraft Archive
• H. P. Lovecraft at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "H.P. Lovecraft" by S. T. Joshi
• The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon
• The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society
• A Virtual Walking Tour of Lovecraft's Providence
• The Howard P. Lovecraft Collection in Special Collections at John Hay Library [4]
• Works by H. P. Lovecraft at Project Gutenberg
• H. P. Lovecraft public domain audiobooks from LibriVox

Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter
Born	Helen Beatrix Potter 28 July 1866 Kensington, London, England
Died	22 December 1943(1943-12-22) (aged 77) Near Sawrey, Cumbria, England
Occupation	Children's author and illustrator
Genres	Children's literature
Notable work(s)	The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Spouse(s)	William Heelis

Helen Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life.

Born into a privileged Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother, Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. Summer holidays were spent in Scotland and in the English Lake District where Beatrix developed a love of the natural world which was the subject of her painting from an early age.

She was educated by private governesses until she was eighteen. Her study of languages, literature, science and history was broad and she was an eager student. Her artistic talents were recognized early. Although she was provided with private art lessons, Potter preferred to develop her own style, particularly favouring watercolour. Along with her drawings of her animals, real and imagined, she illustrated insects, fossils, archeological artefacts, and fungi. In the 1890s her mycological illustrations and research on the reproduction of fungi spores generated interest from the scientific establishment. Following some success illustrating cards and booklets, Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit publishing it first privately in 1901, and a year later as a small, three-colour illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. She became unofficially engaged to her editor Norman Warne in 1905 despite the disapproval of her parents, but he died suddenly a month later, of leukemia.^[1]

With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village in the English Lake District near Ambleside in 1905. Over the next several decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Potter was also a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write, illustrate and design spin-off merchandise based on her children’s books for Warne until the duties of land management and diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue. Potter published over twenty-three books; the best known are those written between 1902 and 1922. She died on 22 December 1943 at her home in Near Sawrey at age 77, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust. She is credited with preserving much of the land that now comprises the Lake District National Park.

Potter’s books continue to sell throughout the world, in multiple languages. Her stories have been retold in song, film, ballet and animation.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Potter at fifteen years with her springer spaniel, Spot

Potter’s family on both sides was from the Manchester area.^[2] They were English Unitarians,^[3] a Dissenting Protestant sect who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and were socially and politically discriminated against. Potter’s paternal grandfather, Edmund Potter, from Glossop in Derbyshire, owned the largest calico printing works in England at the time, and later served as a Member of Parliament.^[4] Beatrix’s father, Rupert William Potter (1832–1914), was educated in Manchester and trained as a barrister in London. He married Helen Leech (1839–1932), the daughter of another wealthy cotton merchant and shipbuilder from Stalybridge, at Gee Cross on 8 August 1863. Rupert practiced law, specializing in equity law and conveyancing. They lived comfortably at No. 2 Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, where Helen Beatrix was born on 28 July 1866 and her brother Walter Bertram on 14 March 1872.^[5] Both parents were artistically talented,^[6] and Rupert was an adept amateur photographer.^[7] Rupert had invested in the stock market and by the early 1890s was extremely wealthy.^[8]

Beatrix was educated by three able governesses, the last of whom was Annie Moore (née Carter), just three years older than Beatrix, who tutored Beatrix in German as well as acting as lady's companion.^[9] She and Beatrix remained friends throughout their lives and Annie's eight children were the recipients of many of Potter’s delightful picture letters. It was Annie who later suggested that these letters might make good children’s books.^[10]

In their school room Beatrix and Bertram kept a variety of small pets, mice, rabbits, a hedgehog, some bats, along with collections of butterflies and other insects which they drew and studied.^[11] There is no evidence to support claims that any of these creatures were mistreated, or that the motive for their study was anything more sinister than natural curiosity and a desire to draw from life. Quite the contrary, Beatrix was devoted to the care of her small animals, often taking them with her on long holidays.^[12]

For most of the first fifteen years of her life, Beatrix spent summer holidays at Dalguise, an estate in Scotland in Perthshire on the River Tay. There she sketched and explored an area that nourished her imagination and her observation.^[13] Beatrix and her brother were allowed great freedoms in the country and both children became adept students of natural history. In 1887, when Dalguise was no longer available, the Potters took their first summer holiday in Lancashire in the English Lake District, at Wray Castle near Windermere.^[14] As a result, Beatrix came to meet Hardwicke Rawnsley, incumbent vicar at Wray and later the founding secretary of the National Trust, whose interest in the countryside and country life inspired the same in Beatrix and who was to have a lasting impact on her life.^[15][16]

About age 14 Beatrix, like many girls at the time, began to keep a diary. Beatrix's was written in a code of her own devising which was a simple letter for letter substitution. Her Journal was an important laboratory for her creativity serving as both sketchbook and literary experiment where in tiny handwriting she reported on society, recorded her impressions of art and artists, recounted stories, and observed life around her.^[17] The Journal, decoded and transcribed by Leslie Linder in 1958, does not provide an intimate record of her personal life, but it is an invaluable source for understanding a vibrant part of British society in the late 19th century. It describes Potter’s maturing artistic and intellectual interests, her often amusing insights on the places she visited, and her unusual ability to observe nature and to describe it. Begun in 1881, her Journal ends in 1897 when her artistic and intellectual energies were absorbed in scientific study and in efforts to publish her drawings.^[18] Precocious but reserved and often bored, she was searching for more independent activities and a desire to earn some money of her own whilst dutifully taking care of her parents, dealing with her especially demanding mother,^[19] and managing their various households.

Scientific illustrations and work in mycology[link]

Beatrix Potter’s parents did not discourage higher education. As was common in the Victorian Era, women of her class were privately educated and rarely sent to college.^[20]

Beatrix Potter was interested in every branch of natural science save astronomy.^[21] Botany was a passion for most Victorians and nature study was a popular enthusiasm. Potter was eclectic in her tastes; collecting fossils,^[22] studying archeological artifacts from London excavations, and interested in entomology. In all of these areas she drew and painted her specimens with increasing skill. By the 1890s her scientific interests centered on mycology. First drawn to fungi because of their colours and evanescence in nature and her delight in painting them, her interest deepened after meeting Charles McIntosh, a revered naturalist and mycologist during a summer holiday in Perthshire in 1892. He helped improve the accuracy of her illustrations, taught her taxonomy, and supplied her with live specimens to paint during the winter. Curious as to how fungi reproduced Potter began microscopic drawings of fungi spores (the agarics) and in 1895 developed a theory of their germination.^[23] Through the aegis of her scientific uncle, Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, a chemist and vice chancellor of the University of London, she consulted with botanists at The Royal Gardens at Kew, convincing George Massee of her ability to germinate spores and her theory of hybridisation.^[24] She did not believe in the theory of symbiosis proposed by Simon Schwendener, the German mycologist as previously thought, rather she proposed a more independent process of reproduction.^[25]

Rebuffed by William Thiselton-Dyer, the Director at Kew, because of her gender and her amateur status, Beatrix wrote up her conclusions and submitted a paper “On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae” to the Linnean Society in 1897. It was introduced by Massee because, as a female, Potter could not attend proceedings or read her paper. She subsequently withdrew it realizing that some of her samples were contaminated, but continued her microscopic studies for several more years. Her paper has only recently been rediscovered, along with the rich, artistic illustrations and drawings that accompanied it. Her work is only now being properly evaluated.^[26][27][28] Potter later gave her other mycological drawings and scientific drawings to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside where mycologists still refer to them to identify fungi. There is also a collection of her fungi paintings at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Perth, Scotland donated by Charles McIntosh. In 1967 the mycologist W.P.K. Findlay included many of Potter’s beautifully accurate fungi drawings in his Wayside & Woodland Fungi, thereby fulfilling her desire to one day have her fungi drawings published in a book.^[29] In 1997 the Linnean Society issued a posthumous apology to Potter for the sexism displayed in its handling of her research.^[30]

Artistic and literary career[link]

Potter’s artistic and literary interests were deeply influenced by fairies, fairy tales and fantasy. She was a student of the classic fairy tales of Western Europe. As well as stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she grew up with Aesop’s Fables, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies,^[31] the folk tales and mythology of Scotland, the German Romantics, Shakespeare,^[32] and the romances of Sir Walter Scott.^[33] As a young child, before the age of eight, Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, including the much loved The Owl and the Pussycat, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland had made their impression, although she later said of Alice that she was more interested in Tenniel's illustrations than what they were about.^[34] The Brer Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris had been family favourites and she later studied his Uncle Remus stories and illustrated them.^[35] She studied book illustration from a young age and developed her own tastes, but the work of the picture book triumvirate Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott, the latter an illustrator whose work was later collected by her father, was a great influence.^[36] When she started to illustrate, she chose first the traditional rhymes and stories, “Cinderella”, “Sleeping Beauty", “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, “Puss-in-boots,” and “Red Riding Hood.”^[37] But most often her illustrations were fantasies featuring her own pets: mice, rabbits, kittens, and guinea pigs.^[38]

In her teenage years Potter was a regular visitor to the art galleries of London, particularly enjoying the Summer and Winter Exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London.^[39] Her Journal reveals her growing sophistication as a critic as well as the influence of her father’s friend the artist Sir John Everett Millais who recognized Beatrix’s talent of observation. Although Potter was aware of art and artistic trends, her drawing and her prose style were uniquely her own.^[40]

As a way to earn a bit of money in the 1890s, Beatrix and her brother began to print Christmas cards of their own design, as well as cards for special occasions. Mice and rabbits were the most frequent subject of her fantasy paintings. In 1890 the firm of Hildesheimer and Faulkner bought several of her drawings of her rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, to illustrate verses by Frederic Weatherly titled A Happy Pair. In 1893 the same printer brought several more drawings for Weatherly’s Our Dear Relations, another book of rhymes, and the following year Potter successfully sold a series of frog illustrations and verses for Changing Pictures, a popular annual offered by the art publisher Ernest Nister. Potter was pleased by this success and determined to publish her own illustrated stories.^[41]

Whenever Potter went on holiday to the Lake District or Scotland, she sent letters to young friends illustrating them with quick sketches. Many of these letters were written to the children of her former governess Annie Carter Moore, particularly to her oldest son Noel who was often ill. In September 1893 Potter was on holiday at Eastwood in Dunkeld, Scotland. She had run out of things to say to Noel and so she told him a story about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.” It became one of the most famous children’s letters ever written and the basis of Potter’s future career as a writer-artist-storyteller.^[42]

In 1900, Potter revised her tale about the four little rabbits, and fashioned a dummy book of it - it has been suggested, in imitation of Helen Bannerman's 1899 bestseller The Story of Little Black Sambo.^[43] Unable to find a buyer for the work, she published it for family and friends at her own expense in December 1901. It was drawn in black and white with a coloured frontispiece. Family friend Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley had great faith in Potter's tale, recast it in didactic verse, and made the rounds of the London publishing houses. Frederick Warne & Co. had previously rejected the tale but, eager to compete in the booming small format children's book market, reconsidered and accepted the "bunny book" (as the firm called it) following the recommendation of their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke.^[44] The firm declined Rawnsley's verse in favour of Potter's original prose, and Potter agreed to colour her pen and ink illustrations, choosing the then-new Hentschel three-colour process for reproducing her watercolours.^[45]

Potter used many real locations for her book illustrations, the Tower Bank Arms, Near Sawrey appears in The tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.

On 2 October 1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published,^[46] and was an immediate success. It was followed the next year by The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester which had also first been written as picture letters to the Moore children. Working with Norman Warne as her editor, Potter published two or three little books each year for a total of twenty-three books. The last book in this format was Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes in 1922, a collection of favorite rhymes. Although The Tale of Pigling Bland was not published until 1930, it had been written much earlier. Potter continued creating her little books until after World War I when her energies were increasingly directed toward her farming, sheep-breeding, and land conservation.^[47]

The immense popularity of Potter’s books was based on the lively quality of her illustrations, the non-didactic nature of her stories, the depiction of the rural countryside, and the imaginative qualities she lent to her animal characters.

Potter was also a canny businesswoman. As early as 1903 she made and patented a Peter Rabbit doll. It was followed by other “spin-off” merchandise over the years, including painting books, board games, wall-paper, figurines, baby blankets and china tea-sets. All were licensed by Frederick Warne & Co. and earned Potter an independent income as well as immense profits for her publisher.^[48]

In 1905, Potter and Norman Warne became unofficially engaged. Potters’ parents objected to the match because Warne was “in trade” and thus not socially suitable. Sadly the engagement lasted only one month when Warne died of leukemia at age thirty-seven.^[49] That same year Potter used some of her income and a small inheritance from an aunt to buy Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey in Lancashire (now Cumbria) in the English Lake District. Potter and Warne may have hoped that Hill Top Farm would be their holiday home, but after Warne's death Potter went ahead with its purchase as she had always wanted to own that farm and live in "that charming village".^[50]

Country Life[link]

Hill Top, Near Sawrey – Potter's former home, now owned by the National Trust and preserved as it was when she lived and wrote her stories there.

The tenant farmer John Cannon and his family agreed to stay on to manage the farm for her while she made physical improvements learned the techniques of fell farming and of raising livestock, including pigs, cows and chickens; the following year she added sheep. Realising she needed to protect her boundaries she sought advice from W.H. Heelis & Son, a local firm of solicitors with offices in nearby Hawkshead. With William Heelis acting for her she bought contiguous pasture, and in 1909 the 20 acres (81,000 m²) Castle Farm across the road from Hill Top Farm. Visiting Hill Top every chance she got, Potter’s books written during this period (such as The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, about the local shop in Near Sawrey and The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse, a wood mouse) reflect her increasing participation in village life and her delight in country living.^[51]

Owning and managing these working farms required the routine collaboration with the widely respected William Heelis. By the summer of 1912 Heelis had proposed marriage and Beatrix had accepted, although she did not immediately tell her parents who once again disapproved because Heelis was only a country solicitor. Potter and Heelis were married on 15 October 1913 in London at St. Mary Abbots in Kensington. The couple moved immediately to Near Sawrey, residing at Castle Cottage, the renovated farm house on Castle Farm. Hill Top remained a working farm but was now remodelled to allow for the tenant family and Potter’s private studio and work shop. At last her own woman, Potter settled into the partnerships that shaped the rest of her life: her country solicitor husband and his large family, her farms, the Sawrey community and the predictable rounds of country life. The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and The Tale of Tom Kitten are representative of Hill Top Farm and of her farming life, and reflect her happiness with her country life.^[52]

After Rupert Potter died in 1914, Potter, now a wealthy woman, found Lindeth Howe, a large house in nearby Windermere where her mother lived until her death in 1931 at the age of 93. Potter continued to write stories for Frederick Warne & Co. and fully participated in country life. She established a Nursing Trust for local villages, and served on various committees and councils responsible for foot-paths and other country life issues.^[53]

Sheep farming[link]

Beatrix Potter Heelis became keenly interested the breeding and raising of Herdwick sheep, the indigenous fell sheep, soon after acquiring Hill Top Farm. In 1923 she bought a former deer park and vast sheep farm in the Troutbeck Valley called Troutbeck Park Farm, restoring its land, its thousands of Herdwick sheep, and establishing her as one of the major Herdwick sheep farmers in the area. She was admired by her shepherds and farm managers for her willingness to experiment with the latest biological remedies for the common diseases of sheep, and for her employment of the best shepherds, sheep breeders, and farm managers.^[54]

By the late 1920s Potter and her Hill Top farm manager Tom Storey had made a name for their prize-winning Herdwick flock. As a Herdwick breeder she won many prizes at the local agricultural shows and was frequently asked to serve as a judge. In 1942 she was named President-elect of The Herdwick Sheepbreeders’ Association, the first time a woman had ever been elected to that office, but died before taking office.^[55]

Lake District conservation[link]

Potter had been a disciple of the land conservation and preservation ideals of her long-time friend and mentor, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, the first secretary and founding member of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She supported the efforts of the National Trust to preserve not just the places of extraordinary beauty, but those heads of valley and low grazing lands that would be irreparably ruined by development. She was also an authority on the traditional Lakeland crafts, period furniture and stonework. She restored and preserved the farms that she bought or managed, making sure that each farm house had in it a piece of antique Lakeland furniture. Potter was interested in preserving not only the Herdwick sheep, but the way of life of fell farming. In 1930 the Heelises became partners with the National Trust in buying and managing the fell farms included in the large Monk Coniston Estate. The estate was composed of many farms spread over a wide area of western Lancashire, including the famously beautiful Tarn Hows. Potter became the de facto estate manager for the Trust for seven years until the National Trust could afford to buy most of the property back from her. Her stewardship of these farms earned her wide regard, but she was not without her critics. She was notable in observing the problems of afforestation, preserving the intake grazing lands, and husbanding the quarries and timber on these farms. All her farms were stocked with Herdwick sheep and frequently with Galloway cattle.

Later life[link]

Potter continued to write stories and to draw, although mostly for her own pleasure. Her books in the late 1920s included the semi-autobiographical The Fairy Caravan, a fanciful tale set in her beloved Troutbeck fells. It was published only in the US during Potter’s lifetime, and not until 1952 in the UK. Sister Anne, Potter’s version of the story of Bluebeard was written especially for her American readers but illustrated by Katharine Sturges. A final folktale, Wag by Wall, was published posthumously by The Horn Book in 1944. Potter was a generous patron of the Girl Guides whose troops she allowed to make their summer encampments on her lands and whose company she enjoyed as an older woman.^[56]

Potter and William Heelis enjoyed a happy marriage of thirty years, continuing their farming and preservation efforts throughout the hard days of the Second World War. Although they were childless, Potter played an important role in William’s large family, particularly enjoying her relationship with several nieces whom she helped educate and giving comfort and aid to her husband’s brothers and sisters.^[57]

Potter died of complications from pneumonia and heart disease on December 22, 1943 at Castle Cottage. She left nearly all her property to The National Trust, including over 4,000 acres (16 km²) of land, sixteen farms, cottages and herds of cattle andvHerdwick sheep. Hers was the largest gift at that time to the National Trust and it enabled the preservation of the lands now included in the Lake District National Park and the continuation of fell farming. The central office of the National Trust in Swindon was named 'Heelis' in 2005 in her memory. William Heelis continued his stewardship of their properties and of her literary and artistic work for the eighteen months he survived her. When he died in August 1945 he left the remainder to the National Trust.^[58]

Legacies[link]

Potter left almost all the original illustrations for her books to the National Trust. The copyright to her stories and merchandise was given to her publisher Frederick Warne & Co, now a division of the Penguin Group. Hill Top Farm was opened to the public by the National Trust in 1946 her artwork was displayed there until 1985 when it was moved to William Heelis’s former law offices in Hawkshead, also owned by the National Trust as the Beatrix Potter Gallery.^[59]

Potter gave her folios of mycological drawings to The Armitt Library and Museum in Ambleside before her death. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is owned by Frederick Warne and Company, The Tailor of Gloucester by the Tate Gallery, and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by the British Museum.

The largest public collection of her letters and drawings is the Leslie Linder Bequest and Leslie Linder Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the United States, the largest public collections are those in the Special Collections of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Lloyd Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University.

Themes[link]

There are many interpretations of Potter’s literary work, the sources of her art, and interpretations of her life and times. Please see bibliography for some of the many critical evaluations of her opus of children’s literature, including Modernist interpretations of Humphrey Carpenter and Katherine Chandler. Judy Taylor, That Naughty Rabbit: Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit, rev. 2002 tells the story of the first publication and many editions. Literary criticism is included in detail in the bibliographies of various biographical works, specialized treatments and exhibit catalogues.^[60]

Potter’s country life and her farming has also been widely discussed in the work of Susan Denyer and by other authors in the publications of The National Trust.

Potter’s work as a scientific illustrator and her work in mycology is highlighted in several chapters in Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, 2007; Beatrix Potter: The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius. 2008, UK.

Adaptations and fictionalisations[link]

In 1971 a ballet film was released, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, directed by Reginald Mills. Set to music by John Lanchbery with choreography by Frederick Ashton and performed in character costume by members of the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera House orchestra. The ballet of the same name has been performed by other dance companies around the world.

In 1982, the BBC produced The Tale of Beatrix Potter. This dramatisation of her life was written by John Hawkesworth and directed by Bill Hayes. It starred Holly Aird and Penelope Wilton as the young and adult Beatrix respectively.^[61]

In 2006 Chris Noonan directed Miss Potter, a biopic of Potter’s life focusing on her early career and romance with her editor Norman Warne. Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor play the title roles.^[62]

Potter is also featured in a series of light mysteries called The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter by Susan Wittig Albert. The eight books in the series starting with the Tale of Hill Top Farm (2004) deal with her life in the Lake District and the village of Near Sawrey between 1905 and 1913.^[63]

Publications[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Letters, journals and writing collections

• Potter, Beatrix (1982). Jane Crowell Morse. ed. Beatrix Potter's Americans: Selected Letters. The Horn Book, Inc. ISBN 978-0-87675-282-1. 
• Potter, Beatrix (1992). Judy Taylor. ed. Beatrix Potter's Letters. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3437-1. 
• Potter, Beatrix (1992). Judy Taylor. ed. Letters to Children from Beatrix Potter. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-4195-9. 
• Potter, Beatrix (1977). Margaret Crawford Maloney. ed. Dear Ivy, Dear June: Letters from Beatrix Potter. Toronto Public Library. ISBN 978-0-8037-2050-3. 
• Potter, Beatrix. (rev. 1989). The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881–1897, transcribed from her code writings by Leslie Linder. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3625-2
• Potter, Beatrix (rev. 1987). Leslie Linder. ed. A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3562-0. 

Art studies

• Hobbs, Anne Stevenson (1989). Beatrix Potter's Art. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 0-7232-3598-8. 
• Hobbs, Anne Stevenson (1990). Beatrix Potter's Art. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3598-9. 
• Hobbs, Anne Stevenson (2005). Beatrix Potter: Artist and Illustrator. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-5700-4. 
• Jay, Eileen, Mary Noble & Anne Stevenson Hobbs (1992). A Victorian Naturalist: Beatrix Potter's Drawings from the Armitt Collection. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3990-1. 
• Taylor, Judy, Joyce Irene Whalley, Anne Stevenson Hobbs & Elizabeth M. Battrick (1987). Beatrix Potter, 1866–1943: The Artist and Her World. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-3561-3. 

Biographical studies

• Battrick, Elizabeth (1999). Beatrix Potter: The Unknown Years. Armitt Library and Museum and F.Warne & Co.. ISBN 978-0-7232-4608-4. 
• Denyer, Susan (2000). Beatrix Potter: At Home with Beatrix Potter: The Creator of Peter Rabbit. Harry Abrams. ISBN 978-0-7112-3018-7. 
• Heelis, John (1999). The Tale of Mrs William Heelis – Beatrix Potter. Sutton Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7509-3432-9. 
• Lane, Margaret (1946, rev. ed. 1985). The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-4676-3. 
• Lane, Margaret (1978). The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-2108-1. 
• Lear, Linda (2007). Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. St. Martin's. ISBN 978-0-312-36934-7. 
• Lear, Linda (2008). Beatrix Potter: The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-100310-8. 
• MacDonald, Ruth K (1986). Beatrix Potter. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-6917-3. 
• Mitchell, W.R. (2010). Beatrix Potter: Her Lakeland Years. Great Northern Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-905080-71-7. 
• Taylor, Judy (1996, rev. ed. 2002). Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-4175-1. 
• Taylor, Judy (2002). That Naughty Rabbit: Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit. F. Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-4767-8. 
• Taylor, Judy, ed. (1993). `So I Shall Tell You a Story...’: Encounters with Beatrix Potter. F.Warne & Co. ISBN 978-0-7232-4025-9. 
• Taylor, Judy. "Potter, (Helen) Beatrix (1866–1943)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. http://web.archive.org/web/20070930212249/http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35584. Retrieved 14 January 2007. 

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Beatrix Potter

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Beatrix Potter

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Beatrix Potter

• Beatrix Potter’s fossils and her interest in geology - B. G. Gardiner
• Works by Beatrix Potter at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Collection of Potter materials at Victoria and Albert Museum
• Beatrix Potter online feature at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences
• Beatrix Potter in Cumbria
• Beatrix Potter Society, UK
• Beatrix Potter's World
• Frederick Warne and Company
• Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature