Quoted By:
On Lovecraft's popularity late in his life
>"Lovecraft was becoming the hub of an increasingly complex network of fans and writers in the field of weird and science fiction; and in the last four years of his life he attracted a substantial number of young people (mostly boys) who looked upon him as a living legend."
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On a female correspondent visiting Lovecraft
>"Lovecraft paid for all [Helen V.] Sully's expenses -meals, trips, lodging at the boarding house across the street [...] she could not have known what a severe burden this must have placed upon his own perilous financial condition. One evening he took her to one of his favorite haunts, the hidden churchyard of St John's Episcopal Church: "It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone [...] something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me."
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On the decline of art
>"Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence and sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assumed position can enjoy. The determinant market for written [...] and other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger [...] circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods of whose systematically perverted ideals [...] prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspective of the gentlefolk whose dress and speech and external manners they so assiduously mimicked. [...] and they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reorientated to them."
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