Friday, June 7, 2013

Lovecraft in History--the First Decade


Here is a timeline of H.P. Lovecraft’s earlier work—his first decade.  Publication dates of his various works of fiction are juxtaposed with the work of some of his contemporaries, as well as some important historical or cultural events from the same time period.  The listings are hardly exhaustive—so much was happening in the country at this point in history.  We can only speculate about the factors which may have influenced Lovecraft as he was beginning his career.


Year
H.P. Lovecraft
Contemporaries
Current Events
1916
The Alchemist
Tales of Wonder
By Lord Dunsany
World War I in progress,
stainless steel invented,
end of Progressive Era

1917
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
The Son of Tarzan
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
Woodrow Wilson’s second term,
Women’s Suffrage,
zipper is patented
1918
The Beast in the Cave
The Poe-ets Nightmare
The Moon Pool
By Abraham Merritt
The Decline of the West
By Oswald Spengler
Influenza epidemic,
World War I ends,
first fortune cookies
1919
Memory
Despair
The Picture in the House
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme
The White Ship
The House
The Nightmare Lake
Dagon
Unseen—Unfeared
By Francis Stevens
In the Penal Colony
By Franz Kafka
RCA is founded,
pop up toasters invented,
soldiers return from the Great War
1920
Poetry and the Gods
Nyarlathotep
Polaris
The Street
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Cats of Ulthar
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
( film)
The Golem
(film)
Swanee
Sung by Al Jolsen
Babe Ruth sold to the Yankees,
Prohibition,
labor unions struggle

1921
Ex Oblivione
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
To A Dreamer
The Nameless City
The Crawling Chaos
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
Tarzan the Terrible
By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Emergence of Hitler and Mussolini,
Ku Klux Klan active, first robot,
lie detector is invented,
first religious service broadcast by radio
1922
The Tomb
Celephaïs
Herbert West—Reanimator
The Music of Eric Zahn
Negotium Perambulans
By E.F. Benson
Nosferatu
(film)
The Wasteland
By T.S. Eliot
Ulysses
By James Joyce
USSR forms,
insulin developed
1923
Hypnos
What the Moon Brings
The Horror at Martin’s Beach
The Invisible Monster
The Lurking Fear
First issue of Weird Tales
The Thing From Outside
By George Allen England
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (film)
R.U.R.
By Karol Capek
First traffic signals,
primitive TV
(cathode ray invented),
frozen food appears
1924
The Hound
The Rats in the Walls
Under the Pyramids
(aka Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)
The Amulet of Hell
By Robert Leonard Russell
Rhapsody in Blue
By George Gershwin
Dinosaur bones found in Gobi Desert,
Calvin Coolidge is president,
Will Rogers,
spiral notebooks,
loudspeakers
1925
The Festival
The Temple
The Unnamable
In the Vault
Lukundoo
By Edward Lucas White
A Warning to the Curious
By M.R. James
The Lost World
(film)
The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Surrealism in Art,  Realism,
Art Deco
1926
Hallowe’en in a Suburb
The Moon Bog
He
Festival (aka Yule Horror)
The Outsider
Winnie the Pooh
By A.A. Milne
Liquid fueled rockets

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