@Ghost said in Separating Art From Artist:
So is Mark Twain in the same category as HP Lovecraft?
Mark Twain wrote a polemic on how slavery was wrong, and how, in fact, everything about the antebellum south of the United States was an ever-raging trash fire; the climax of the protagonist's moral development, and what I consider the most profoundly impactful moral moments in English literature, is when Huck rejects what he's been told is moral and Divine law by his society over the love and friendship with a fellow human being. The place of Huckleberry Finn in the Western canon is well earned.
At the same time, Clemens loved him a minstrel show. I can absolutely understand why someone, especially someone who happens to be black, wouldn't enjoy it as a work outside of its cultural significance. And, y'know, when Jim talks like a minstrel extra and grants n-word privileges to a room full of middle schoolers, I can understand the decision made by schools to bowlderize the work in their curricula or remove them entirely.
Lovecraft is so racist that it becomes cartoonish. The Shadow over Innsmouth was inspired by Lovecraft's discovery that what he had thought was his pure Anglo-Saxon heritage had been diluted through miscegenation with the Welsh and that isn't even a joke. His notion of cosmic horror has been key to the development of the genre since his life--you can talk about the fanfiction, sure, but just about anything with cults or gods unknowable and alien is almost certainly going to have some Lovecraft in its literary DNA. I'd put it at the level of Citizen Kane in terms of something that's very significant to a scholar of the work it's influenced, but what had been revolutionary has been copied to the point of being ubiquitous so a modern consumer isn't likely to get anything new from the reading.
Of course, Lovecraft died in 1937, so by buying one of his books you aren't supporting a non-profit dedicated to the removal of civil rights the way you are by picking up Ender's Game.
