"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.
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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.[1]
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".[2]
Reaction
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia describes this story as "manifestly racist".[3] 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."[4]
References
- S. T. Joshi and David Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia
Footnotes
- ^ H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 11, 1920; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 254.
- ^ Joshi and Schultz, pp. 254-255.
- ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 254.
- ^ Daniel Harms, "The Street", The Shadow Over Usenet.
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