AA proposal (WA #6)

H.P Lovecraft: Maddness to Method

For my American Author Project I would like to read and study Howard Phillips Lovecraft the occult short story horror novelist and the sole creator of the Comicism (like L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics). I’m drawn to this author because I want to broaden my imaginations pallet and feel his odd about aliens being gods and monsters trapped in a thousand year sleep is the next step. The second reason I feel drawn to Lovecraft is because He grew up in the same state I grew up in, Rhode Island, where both of us had the same sensation of being the big fish in the smallest pond in America because his famous quote is “I am Providence”, which may seem a bit cocky but if you ever went or lived in Rhode Island you’d understand that a tadpole here is a Shark there.
I could easily write ten pages on Lovecraft because within his writings are a lot of hidden messages and metaphors. He’s often questioned and still a hot topic on whether he himself was racist or if he just wanted to make a historical connection in his Cthulu series where he has dark skinned aliens with curly tentacles who are slaves to their god Cthulu. Cthulu himself represents god and oppression caused by church and religion he shows this by giving Cthulu the ability to control dreams and portrays this god as a beast with hundreds of tentacles of which absolute evil resonates. Yog Sothoth on the other hand represents truth shown as an entity of bubbles and slime who is said to possess the power to travel through time and space and oversee the universe yet he’s trapped outside the universe never being able to interfere only oversee events. These gods could easily show a meaning of polytheism beliefs that are lost once From that fact alone I could easily pull the argument either way and I could easily almost whimsically blow through that paper talking about the times H.P grew up in and why he might’ve had these thoughts or ideas. My basic plan so far for my paper is to write an introductory to H.P Lovecraft and a brief overview of the three books I’ve read (which would be compilations since his stories are so short). For the following Paragraphs I’ll talk about the issues he brings up in his stories and then pretty much hold a one sided argument that H.P meant to put these metaphors in his stories because he believed in them, or if he just wanted to give some sort of commentary or real world connection between his fantasy worlds and ours.
For the biography I have to read I’ll end up reading two biographies, I’ve seen two in particular that looked equally biased from opposite ends of a spectrum one being “H.P Lovecraft is the greatest writer ever” and the other one might as well had been “R.I.P Lovecraft: stay dead”. I’m doing this not because I feel like giving myself extra work but to take the black and the white from his life because I’m sure each book will hide good/bad things about his life, as I’m sure anyone’s life biography is biased but with both opposite ends of this spectrum I can make a grey out of it and decide for myself what’s myth and what’s legend. I suppose my overall project will be more of an analysis of both H.P Lovecraft the author and Howard Phillips, a man who lived in the dawn of the 20th century. That isn’t to say that the two can’t or aren’t the same person but from what I’ve read a different entity. From reading H.P Lovecraft you can’t help to get the sensation that even now it’s ahead of it’s time, and these books of his were written one hundred years ago, yet his public status was quite sane and intellectual, meaning he probably wasn’t insane but maybe he was trying to be odd or maybe he just kept it to himself, details will probably unfold as I read his biography. In conclusion I’d like to read H.P Lovecraft’s work for my American author project because he meets all the criteria, is an interesting author in history and I feel I could challenge myself with these obscure readings.