Henry James, in a 1913 charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent.

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Although apparently written back in 2008, long before I began writing about James and Lovecraft, I only recently stumbled across this quote from pioneer Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, which might be said to encapsulate my concern in this series of articles:

The history of Lovecraft’s reputation—his initial rejection by Edmund Wilson and others as a pulp hack; the championing of his work by Derleth, Fritz Leiber, and George T. Wetzel; (more…)

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The Annunciation by Simone Martini, 1333

We’ve been very pleased by the response to our essay “The Eldritch Evola,” which was not only picked up by Greg Johnson (whose own Confessions of a Reluctant Hater is out and essential reading) for his estimable website Counter-Currents, but even managed to lurch upwards and lay a terrible, green claw on the bottom rung of the “Top Ten Most Visited Posts” there in January.

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And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. — E. A. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

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