A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time is a biography of Lovecraft by prominent scholar and critic S. T. Joshi.
Overview[]
| “ | H.P. Lovecraft has come to be recognised as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century. But how did a man who died in poverty, with no book of his stories published in his lifetime, become such an icon in horror literature? S.T. Joshi, the leading authority on Lovecraft, has traced in detail the course of Lovecraft’s life, spent largely in Providence, Rhode Island, and has shown how Lovecraft was engaged in the political, economic, social, and intellectual currents of his time, and how his developing thought informed his fiction and other writings. Lovecraft’s reaction to World War I, the Jazz Age, and the Depression, as well as to literary modernism and scientific advance, markedly affected his thought and work, so that by the end of his life he had become both a ‘mechanistic materialist’ and a ‘cosmic regionalist’ who looked to his New England heritage as a bulwark against the meaningless of a godless cosmos that Lovecraft depicted, with poetic grandeur, in his work. | „ | |
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A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time was published in April 2001 by Liverpool University Press as part of their Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies series. It is a condensed version of Joshi's 1996 biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life.