Henry Anthony Wilcox is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft, who makes his first appearance in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu". He is an art student studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. He is described in terms that somewhat recall Lovecraft himself, as a "thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect [...] The youngest son of an excellent family [...] a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself 'psychically hypersensitive', but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely 'queer'."
Trivia
- The Fleur-de-Lys Building is an actual building that still stands in Providence. Bernard K. Hart, a Providence Journal columnist who lived in the building, took mock-offense at its appropriation by Lovecraft, and threatened in print to send a ghostly visitor to Lovecraft's own address. Lovecraft's sonnet "The Messenger" is his response to this threat.
- "Wilcox" is a name from Lovecraft's own family tree.[1]
References
- ↑ Joshi and Schultz, "Call of Cthulhu, The", p. 29.