This issue features a microinterview with S. T. Joshi, conducted by Fritz Swanson. Joshi began his career as an H. P. Lovecraft scholar at the age of seventeen, in 1975. The compilation of criticism, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, that Joshi began as a young man led to a comprehensive bibliography of Lovecraft’s work released by Kent State University Press. He now acts as the unofficial curator of Lovecraft’s life and work, editing the definitive editions of Lovecraft’s fiction for Penguin Books, and working to release all of Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence. Joshi is also a scholar of H. L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce, and has pursued his scholarship independently, without a PhD or the support of any academic institution.

MICROINTERVIEW WITH S. T. JOSHI, PART I.

THE BELIEVER: You are the curator of three of America’s greatest misanthropes: Mencken, Bierce, and Lovecraft. Do you hate humanity?

S.T. JOSHI: I’m not sure that any of the three writers in question really were misanthropes—Lovecraft certainly wasn’t, proclaiming himself an “indifferentist”—and if I have any misanthropy of my own, it probably derives more from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than from Mencken, Bierce, or Lovecraft. Hatred is too exhausting an emotion to maintain for very long, or at all; I have better things to do with my time and energy than to go around hating anyone. A mild, passing contempt for human folly and hypocrisy (admittedly an almost universal phenomenon among human beings) is the most I can summon. I will confess, though, that to the degree that I have that contempt, I cannot consider myself a “humanist,” since humanism essentially replaces love of God with love of the human race, an emotion I have trouble sharing or even comprehending. I am a proponent of certain aspects of civilization—chiefly artistic and intellectual endeavors—that happen to be the reserve of the few; but these aspects themselves could not survive without the social/political/ cultural framework provided by the human race as a whole.

MICROINTERVIEW WITH S. T. JOSHI, PART II.

THE BELIEVER: So much of Lovecraft’s work is framed as research and presented as a set of false documents. Can you describe the mythos he was attempting to create? Was it “fiction” as we understand it, or something else?

S. T. JOSHI: Lovecraft liked the idea of writing stories that were “hoaxes”—so convincing in their documentary verisimilitude that they could be mistaken for treatises (such as At the Mountains of Madness) or confessions (beginning so early as “The Statement of Randolph Carter”). In some sense he was following Poe, who felt that stories had to start with an essay like beginning (remember the imperishable opening lines of “Berenice”: “Misery is manifold....