An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

HPL notes that the piece not only was based largely on a dream, but also that the first paragraph (presumably following the very brief opening paragraph) was written while he was still half-asleep ( SL1.160). As with “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” the dream involved Samuel Loveman, who wrote HPL the following note: “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.” HPL states that the peculiar name Nyarlathotep came to him in this dream, but one can conjecture at least a partial influence in the name of Dunsany’s minor god Mynarthitep (mentioned fleetingly in “The Sorrow of Search,” in Time and the Gods) or of the prophet Alhireth-Hotep (mentioned in TheGodsofPegāna). -Hotepis of course an Egyptian root, befitting Nyarlathotep’s Egyptian origin. The fact that Nyarlathotep “had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries” places him in the 22nd Dynasty of Egypt (940–730 B.C.E.).

Will Murray has plausibly conjectured that Nyarlathotep (described in the prose poem as an “itinerant showman”) was based upon Nicola Tesla (1856–1943), the eccentric scientist and inventor who created a sensation at the turn of the century for his strange electrical experiments. Nyarlathotep recurs throughout HPL’s later fiction and becomes one of the chief “gods” in his invented pantheon. But he appears in such widely divergent forms that it may not be possible to establish a single or coherent symbolism for him; to say merely, as some critics have done, that he is a “shape-shifter” (something HPL never genuinely suggests) is only to admit that even his physical form is not consistent from story to story, much less his thematic significance.

See Will Murray, “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep,” LSNo. 25 (Fall 1991): 25–29.

< previous page page_191 next page > < previous page page_192 next page >

Page 192

O

O’Brien, Edward J[oseph Harrington] (1890–1941).

Anthologist and literary critic. HPL admired his annual series, The Best Short Stories…(1915f), believing it to be superior to another series, Blanche Colton Williams’s O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories(1919f), which HPL felt reflected commercial rather than literary values. O’Brien cited HPL in the volumes for 1924 (“The Picture in the House” [one star]), 1928 (“The Colour out of Space” [three stars]), and 1929 (“The Dunwich Horror” [three stars], “The Silver Key” [one star]); he published HPL’s “Biographical Notice” in the 1928 volume (it was not repeated in 1929, as such biographies were published only for first-time recipients of three-star ratings). HPL admired O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age(1929), which HPL deemed “a splendid expose of the vulgar shallowness, insincerity, and worthlessness of American commercial fiction under the false-standarded conditions of the present” ( SL4.91). O’Brien, “Kid.”

In “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a semi-professional boxer (presumably Irish but with “a most unHibernian hooked nose,” suggesting that he may actually be Jewish) who inadvertently kills Buck Robinson, an African American, in an informal bout in Bolton, Mass.

“Observations on Several Parts of America.”

Essay (9,700 words); probably written in the fall of 1928. First published in Marginalia(as “Observations on Several Parts of North America”); rpt. MW.

The first of HPL’s several travelogues, which cover his annual spring and summer voyages; written in the form of an open letter to Maurice W.Moe and meant to be circulated to HPL’s other colleagues (hence it exists as a typescript rather than as an autograph ms.). It deals with HPL’s arrival in Brooklyn in the spring of 1928, progressing through his travels to the Hudson River region, Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Vt. (Vrest Orton’s home near Brattleboro), Athol (W.

< previous page page_192 next page > < previous page page_193 next page >

Page 193

Paul Cook) and Wilbraham (Edith Miniter), Mass., Baltimore, Annapolis, Alexandria and Mt. Vernon (home of George Washington), Washington, D.C., and the Endless Caverns near New Market, Va. Moe excerpted the section on Sleepy Hollow as “Sleepy Hollow To-day” and published it as a signed article in Junior Literature: Book Two,ed. Sterling Leonard and Harold Y.Moffett (New York: Macmillan, 1930). (Moe had served as an assistant editor.)

“Old Bugs.”