LogFAQs > #912371886

Dash_Harber posted...

It sucks. The man had some cool ideas, but it sucks that he was such a wingnut. He's also from the time period where opinion on that was starting to turn a bit, making him look even worse.

My problem about knowing the artist is that I always wonder how much of their views bled into their work.

Yeah, Lovecraft is really disappointing, because he was extremely and unrepentedly racist until the end, and it definitely poisons his work. It's particularly disappointing given many of his contemporaries actually got better on the subject over time(such as Robert E. Howard, best known for various Conan the Barbarian stories). And Tolkien made the dwarves Semitic because he thought Hebrew was cool and was really grossed out by racists reading his work as endorsing racism(and there's some evidence he was working on some stories to make that harder).