Thesis on lovecraft

As does every horror writer, he exaggerated his own irrational fears in his stories: his phobia of seafood manifests, one might conclude, in his siting the lair of Cthulhu in the lost city of R’lyeh sunken under the Pacific Ocean.

Lovecraft was well-read but not formally educated, leading him to be almost totally ignorant of subjects that were outside the range of books he chose to absorb. He never attended college, a matter of significant embarrassment and disappointment to him, and he withdrew from Hope High School without a diploma.

Nearly every writer critical of Lovecraft on this ground cites as the prime example of his racism a particular poem supposedly written by him in 1912, but I regard that attribution of authorship as doubtful. (The poem itself is so offensive that I am choosing not to quote it, but you can read it on Wikisource.)

To what extent Lovecraft’s social and political views influenced his created universe is the subject of the title essay in Lovecraft and a World in Transition, a collection by Lovecraft scholar and biographer ST Joshi. Are Lovecraft’s space aliens and other-worldly creatures proxies or stand-ins for humans of color?