Abstract

A note in the Selected Letters says this is Lovecraft's final letter, unfinished at the time of his death, preceded by several memos. S. T. Joshi in A Look At Lovecraft's Letters notes it was probably begun up to a month before Lovecraft died.

Lovecraft in the hospital, doing poorly, but recounts the events of the autumn and winter: received a visit from Maurice W. Moe in September, and was plugging away at a job for Anne Tillery Renshaw in October, in October he also attended "The Skyscrapers" (an amateur astronomer group) and went over some old astronomy articles he had written, on making the acquaintance of Stuart Morton Boland, hiking Neutaconkanut Hill (the description of which August Derleth incorporated into "The Lamp of Alhazred"), finding a pair of kittens in Squantum Woods, his first sight of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the November election, some local lectures, the present of a human skull from Willis Conover (with a bit of fun regarding it and the Necronomicon), on the debilitating illness (still described as a "grippe"), not much time for Weird Tales though he read "The Headless Miller of Kobold's Keep" and praised Virgil Finlay's illustrations, Wright sending the originals of both Finlay's illustrations for "The Haunter in the Dark" and "The Thing on the Doorstep" to Lovecraft, on Finlay (including a full poem dedicated to him for illustrating Robert Bloch's "The Faceless God"), on Clark Ashton Smith's art exhibition (and another poem, dedicated to Smith on the occasion), his appreciation of a posthumous tale by Robert E. Howard and Henry Kuttner's story in Weird Tales, on writers attempting a terrible pseudo-ancient style to represent late 18th-century English (mentioning William Hope Hodgson), the text of a book curse suitable for "The Album," mention of August Derleth's Sac Prairie novel Still is the Summer Night, on Crawford's issuing of The Shadow over Innsmouth as a misprinted and poorly bound book, "Pickman's Model" to be reprinted in a Not at Night anthology, on the coincidence of corresponding with Fritz Leiber, Jr. (whose father, Fritz Leiber, Sr., Lovecraft had known as an actor), on the younger Leiber's Adept's Gambit, on Harry O. Fischer (the model for Leiber's Gray Mouser), on Adolphe de Castro and Henry Kuttner, on recent reading (including Strachey's Nature of Capitalist Crisis, R. P. Dutt's Fascism and Social Revolution, and the life of Thomas Holley Chivers), on seeing Winterset and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the cinema, New York friends asking Lovecraft to come down and see the surrealist paintings of Dali et al. at the Museum of Modern Art.

Cited By

• A Look At Lovecraft's Letters
• Dystopia as Utopia: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Unknown Content of American Horror Literature

Included In

• Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (abridged)