The Street (short story)

"The Street" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in late 1919 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the "Wolverine" amateur journal.

Inspiration

The Boston police strike of September-October 1919 inspired Lovecraft to write "The Street", as he declared in a letter to Frank Belknap Long:

:The Boston police mutiny of last year is what prompted that attempt--the magnitude and significance of such an act appalled me. Last fall it was grimly impressive to see Boston without bluecoats, and to watch the musket-bearing State Guardsmen patrolling the streets as though military occupation were in force. They went in pairs, determined-looking and khaki-clad, as if symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation's struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevism. [H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 11, 1920; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 254.]

The story's anti-immigrant stance echoes such earlier xenophobic poems by Lovecraft as "New England Fallen" and "On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight". [Joshi and Schultz, pp. 254-255.]

Reaction

"An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia" describes this story as "manifestly racist". [Joshi and Schultz, p. 254.] According to Daniel Harms, author of "The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana", "If someone came up to me and said, 'Hey Daniel, I think H. P. Lovecraft was a wordy, overly-sentimental bigot whose stories don't make much sense,' this would be the last story I would hand to him to convince him otherwise." [Daniel Harms, [http://www.angelfire.com/space2/pyrkium/Lovecraft/023_TSOU_The_Street.htm "The Street"] , The Shadow Over Usenet.]

References

*S. T. Joshi and David Schultz, "An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia"

Footnotes

External links