Many of Lovecraft's supporters believe that the reluctance of the academic community to embrace Lovecraft stems from an institutionalized distaste for horror. (Russell, 2000)  While such a distaste might well be prevalent, it is not sufficient, by itself, to explain the aforementioned reluctance.  Poe's work can be categorized as horror, and yet Poe is widely accepted.  We therefore have a counterexample to the notion that Lovecraft is relegated to a lesser status due solely to his content.

There are several very good reasons that Lovecraft's work remains somewhat marginalized.  The foremost of these is, quite frankly, the inconsistent quality of his work.  Lovecraft died shortly after reaching maturity as a writer, so a fairly high percentage of his completed work can be considered immature.  Certain works, most notably “Herbert West - Reanimator,” are of such low quality that they are reprinted only on the basis of the author's name.  Other pieces, such as the short story “The Colour Out of Space,” or the prose poem “Nyarlathotep,”¹ are of such high quality that they do not appear to come from the same author as “Herbert West”.  One can get a good feel for the range of Lovecraft's writing by reading his sonnet cycle, “Fungi from Yuggoth.”  Some of the sonnets are extremely weak, for example, sonnets VIII and IX.  Others seem to radiate a strange power.  I am thinking here of sonnets XXI and XXII.

Another reason that Lovecraft's work is difficult for the academic community to accept is that there are questions about what Lovecraft actually wrote.  For the most part, stories by H. P. Lovecraft are just that: Stories by H. P. Lovecraft.  Unfortunately, there are a few exceptions to this rule.  Shortly after Lovecraft's death, his literary executor, a younger writer named August Derleth, started a publishing company called Arkham House, and began reprinting Lovecraft's works.  After that was accomplished, Derleth wrote new books, attempting to mimic Lovecraft's style, and published them as newly published H. P. Lovecraft works.  When discovered, Derleth insisted that these books were “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft.  (Seufert, 2004)  To this day, Derleth's forged stories can be found in any Barnes & Noble, attributed to H. P. Lovecraft.  (The books to watch out for are “The Lurker at the Threshold” and “The Watchers Out of Time.”  These books are not by Lovecraft, no matter what the covers say.)  In spite of all this, some Lovecraft readers credit Derleth with keeping Lovecraft's work in print, an act that some think saved Lovecraft from total obscurity. (Connors, 2000)

To muddy the waters further, Lovecraft often wrote stories under other people's names.  At the time, he was extremely poor, and he could make money by taking amateur writings, and revising them into professional-quality short stories.  Some of these revisions were merely editing jobs.  Others involved writing an entire story from scratch, given a plot idea.  It is often difficult to tell which is which.  Revisions were generally published under the customer's name.

Another element that works against the general acceptance of Lovecraft is the apparent racism which pervades much of his work.  One can imagine a left-leaning² professor of literature, perhaps entertaining the notion of Lovecraft as a noteworthy writer, reading of Lovecraft's casual naming of a black cat “nigger-man,” and swearing to have nothing more to do with H. P. Lovecraft.  This is perhaps the single greatest source of the controversy that surrounds Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's defenders often note that Lovecraft was a product of his time, and claim that his racism was, perhaps, less virulent than that of his contemporaries.  In “The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft,” noted Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi explains that, “At the turn of the century the use of the term 'nigger' was not regarded as offensive.” (Lovecraft, Annotated, 35).  This claim can be demolished by an attentive reading of Lovecraft's blatantly racist, “The Horror at Red Hook.”  Furthermore, in a letter dated December 6, 1915, Lovecraft writes, “the only non-Saxons were niggers... who consequently know their place...  so have I hated the presence of a Jew...  the Oriental mind is but ill adapted to mingle with the Aryan mind...  the one supreme race is the Teuton...  The Welsh, who have no Teutonic blood, are of little account.”  We can clearly see that, early in his career, Lovecraft was a racist, and had contempt for large segments of humanity based on race, religious belief, and ethnicity. 

The claim is often advanced that Lovecraft was not, in fact, a racist at the time of his death, but that he realized his error as he aged.  This claim is partially correct.  It does seem that Lovecraft softened his views on race before his death.  The fact that he married a Jewish woman is often pointed to as a sign that he abandoned his antisemitism.  It does appear that Lovecraft shifted his biases, in some cases, away from race and onto culture.  Near the end of his life, he abandoned notions of racial superiority and inferiority, but he still believed that races and ethnicities should remain distinct in order to preserve cultures intact, and prevent the blending of cultural identities.  (Lovecraft, Lord, 326-327)  It is noteworthy, however, that he regarded culture as a direct result of heredity. We can therefore conclude that Lovecraft was a segregationist even at the time of his death.  There has been much speculation that, had he not died young, Lovecraft would have abandoned segregationism and embraced the notion of equal rights, but this cannot be known.

Yet another thing standing in the way of Lovecraft's critical and academic acceptance is the derivative nature of much of his work.  The primary influence on Lovecraft's writing was Poe, and much of Lovecraft's work bears the clear mark of Poe's style.  Arguably, Lord Dunsany exerted a comparable influence, but Lovecraft's Dunsanian pieces have not attracted the attention that his darker, more Poe-inspired fiction has.

1 Not to be confused with the sonnet of the same title.

2 I do not mean to imply here that the right is more or less racist than the left.  It has been my experience that most (certainly not all) literature professors lean to the left.  It has also been my experience that, at  present, in America, the left tends to have a more emotional reaction to perceived racism.