The Life of a Literary Man
Katherine Kerestman

 

“What an indictment of our culture that great poetry is no longer marketable.”
(What Is Anything? 19)

S. T. JOSHI. What Is Anything: Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2018. (Revised paperback edition 2023.)
S. T. JOSHI. Journals: 1974–1987. Seattle: Sarnath Press, 2021–22. 3 vols.

What Is Anything? Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft recounts the literary odyssey of S. T. Joshi. From the halls of academia to pop culture forums, Joshi is recognized as the chief conservator of the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other early twentieth-century weird writers. The literature itself had been moldering, forgotten, in dusty stacks of decomposing periodicals and in cartons of yellowed letters and clippings disseminated all over the world—well on their way to becoming literary powder—before Joshi ventured into the gloomy catacombs of library archives and personal collections (on both sides of the Atlantic) to resurrect and reanimate the overlooked and mislaid lore and essays of H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and a multitude of weird writers, inauguring the study of Lovecraftian and Weird Fiction.

S. T. Joshi is a man as well as a scholar, and, taken together, his Memoir and Journals form a charming and candid chronicle of the life of a literary man to whom personal connections are vital. In his daily work of publishing, Joshi formed many enduring friendships; and his empathy for the man H. P. Lovecraft equals his esteem for the author’s literary feats. As did Lovecraft, Joshi has lived for literature, has loved felidae, and has cherished intimate relationships with fellow literati. Both writers produced notable work in weird literature while weathering the vicissitudes of romance, finance, and critical opinion. Throughout his life, S. T. Joshi has participated in discourse with the community at large, well beyond the pale of literature, vis-à-vis issues of artistic merit and the duty of publishers to preserve the integrity of a writer’s intellectual property, as well as sundry matters of philosophy—as Lovecraft did in his voluminous correspondence. From an abundance of literary camaraderie, as well as a desire to promote excellence in literature, S. T. Joshi has served as mentor for an untold number of rising young writers.

Joshi fancies detective novels. He has even written a few himself. Indeed, he has often stated that some day he’ll retire and do nothing but read detective stories. In the course of his literary conservation work, he has been able to combine the roles of detective and scholar. His cause is a desperate war against the ravages of time which cause the work of a thinker to be forgotten—a fate far worse than the dissolution of the body for a literary person. An engaging history, these volumes are a page-turner for anyone interested in any genre—for they tell the life story of a literary man, describe a society under siege, offer a vigorous defense of freedom of thought and expression, affirm the right of a writer to be guaranteed the integrity of his work once he sends it out into the world, and make a stand for the value of excellence in any endeavor.

Through the Journals, the reader can share Joshi’s growth from a brilliant yet over-serious and self-important youth to a joyful man who wears his erudition like a second skin and finds happiness (and gives it, too) in his relationships with felidae and humans. The fact that Joshi shares his most private thoughts with his reader evinces a compelling desire to connect deeply with other people, rather than simply to amass a legion of colleagues and fans who know him only superficially or by his work.

The Journals
Joshi was born on June 22, 1958 in Poona, India. His father was a distinguished economist and secularist, his mother a mathematics professor and a Hindu. At the age of five, he emigrated with mother and his two sisters to the United States. Seeking career opportunities unavailable to women in India, Padmini earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and secured a teaching position at Ball State University; and the family assimilated into mainstream American culture. Joshi’s father joined them five years later. Young Joshi excelled in sports (baseball and football), and he remains an ardent fan, still smarting from the defeat of the Chicago Cubs in 1969. Sixties Rock entranced him—especially the music of the Beatles, the Byrds, the Monkees, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Paul Revere and the Raiders—from which he imbibed the concepts of counterculture, resistance to authority, and cynicism—attitudes that inform cosmic horror:

To the extent that I, young as I was, regarded myself as a “child of the 1960s,” I gained—and still retain today—a general inclination toward countercultural rebellions against authority (although not extending to such flamboyancies as taking drugs), a cynicism regarding any true progress in social or cultural life, and emphatic liberalism in politics. (What is Anything? 21)  

Already, he was enough of a realist to understand that socialism is an impossible dream, in light of our limited human nature.

A precocious lad, Joshi embarked upon his literary career almost as soon as he could read. His Catman and Bobbin comic books, written on paper which he folded into booklets and circulated, were his first publications.

As a teenager at Burris Laboratory School (a Montessori-type school taught by the teachers of Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana), Joshi kept meticulous records of the books he read—a vast and eclectic selection of popular and classic works, fiction and nonfiction; these lists are appended to each volume. Already a determined literary man, in Volume 1, Joshi is keen to begin his apprenticeship in writing, editing, and publishing. By the third volume, Joshi has matured into a young man of fiery intellect and ambition, earning two degrees from Brown University (where, upon learning that English departments are obsessed with semiotics and poststructuralism at the expense of literature, he changed his major from English to Classics) and then heading off to Princeton, where he finally rejects academia altogether and embarks upon a life of research and writing.

Begun as a high school English class assignment in 1974, the Journals, being journals, are a series of rambling, stream-of-consciousness notes jotted down for friends to read at some indefinite time in the future; and Joshi continued to record his thoughts and attitudes beyond the school term, seemingly trying to keep the sands of life from slipping through his fingers (as any literary person knows, eternal life, to some extent at least, may be attained by the sorcery of applying ink to paper—or, these days, clicking on SAVE). The stream-of-consciousness chronicling of the maelstrom whirling in Joshi’s youthful head is concerned primarily with reading, writing, music, concerts, fellow musicians, and relationships with teachers and classmates. By 1975, at the age of sixteen, Joshi was already assembling his first book—a collection of critical essays on H. P. Lovecraft—a work which was destined to become the first book on Lovecraft issued by an academic press: H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Ohio University Press, 1980). Several basic elements of Joshi’s personality were apparent at this time, among them, Anglophilia and a preference for English spellings, as well as the habit of analyzing and judging the merits and flaws of everything he reads. Joshi has always taken himself and his projects very seriously, including such high school undertakings as writing book reviews for the school newspaper (The Vanguard) and editing a school literary magazine he helped to found (The Forum). Violin and chorus consumed much of his time at Burris, and he even composed (and still composes) classical music.

Envisioning a future wherein scholars conduct biographical and bibliographical studies of his own life and career, Joshi crafted an extraordinary literary life and accomplished astonishing deeds in order to achieve this projected destiny: “I cannot get out of my mind the image of scholars of the future avidly reading these very words, of bibliophiles and antiquarians hastening hither and thither to acquire, at fantastic sums, my numerous manuscripts” (Journals 1.47). He laid plans for an array of works of fiction and nonfiction for the future. As an amateur editor, Joshi was already coaxing literary friends and colleagues to contribute their writing and to divide the labor required to put out a literary journal.

At Burris, Joshi experienced an epiphany—the realization that, among all the writers he admired, it was Lovecraft who most resonated with him, through a shared antiquarianism and ailurophilia, youthful violin lessons, and philosophy. And then, upon a first reading of L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), Joshi found himself utterly delighted by Lovecraft’s eccentricities; he also gained his first clue that Lovecraft had a sizeable following. It did not take him long, though, to figure out that the biography was full of errors; and he thought that he could improve upon de Camp.

The stars were right for Joshi to begin a literary career. In 1975 he wrote H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Analysis, which he submitted to Shroud Publishers—who accepted it for publication but failed to follow through on their offer, for which lapse Joshi remains grateful. Later that year, he sent a rebuttal of some Lovecraft criticism which he disliked to R. Alain Everts, the publisher of a fanzine. Everts introduced him to Dirk W. Mosig, the leading Lovecraft scholar of the time—who became Joshi’s mentor—and who introduced him to Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, George T. Wetzel, and other leading Lovecraftian scholars. Following high school graduation, Joshi spent the summer knocking on the doors of thirty-three university presses, peddling his anthology of critical essays—and, when he got to Kent State, he was asked to compile a Lovecraft bibliography for their series. While researching the Kent bibliography at the John Hay Library, in Providence, Joshi made the life-changing discovery that the August Derleth editions of Lovecraft’s stories (published by Arkham House) were peppered with errors, and that many of Derleth’s own pieces (listed as “collaborations” with Lovecraft) were merely inspired by notes in Lovecraft’s commonplace book!

Spring and young love were in the air in April of 1976, when Joshi began seeing a lot of fellow violinist Holli Anne Jones. In June, he was prowling through the shadowy archives of the John Hay Library in Providence, his pockets bulging with index cards, on a quest to collect data for the aforementioned bibliography—and he visited Lovecraft’s houses for the very first time. Yet, Joshi was not quite grown up: for instance, when his mother took him shopping for school clothes, his reaction was somewhat histrionic: “I’ve been forced to drag myself all over Muncie looking for shirts, slacks, etc. Great God!—what a horrible business! . . . I am forced, after I return from these hideous ventures, to drown myself in musick to get the taste out of my mouth” (Journals 1.231). In August, Holli Anne left for college on the West Coast, and Joshi was preparing to matriculate at Brown. He filled out citizenship papers.

As the school year began, Joshi devoted every spare moment at Brown to research. He mined both the Hay and the New York City Public Library for Lovecraftian materials, establishing a modus operandi which he would continue throughout his years at Brown (and Princeton, too). Despite laboring around the clock upon his bibliographical researches and writing—these on top of a full-time college schedule—he had a need to enjoy making and listening to classical music. He blew all his spare money on classical recordings—and, always short on funds, he typed other students’ papers to replenish his exchequer. His safaris through book and record stores are charmingly described in his journals, and his purchases logged as precisely as Lovecraft recorded his adventures, shopping for a new suit, his diet, and his itemized household grocery budget. Joshi attributed the episodes of depression and thoughts of suicide, with which he was plagued at this period, to culture shock (the transition to an urban, university life from a small-town childhood, the decision to change his major, and other adjustment difficulties in a rapidly changing life). The cynic in him was already emerging; this entry, for instance, might have been uttered by J. Alfred Prufrock: “I envision that future Joshi scholars will at once admire my multifaceted talents and be repelled by my grievous flaws of character” (Journals 2.79).

Probably the most vital benefit Joshi reaped from an education in the Classics (the study of the languages, literature, and history of Greece and Rome) was a practical knowledge of textual studies, or the art of unearthing and comparing texts which have been subjected to multiple reprintings (or transcribings) in order to discover the author’s original text. A conversation with Dirk Mosig about the textual issues of the Arkham House editions of Lovecraft (and those of other publishers, who borrowed their texts from Arkham House), on the occasion of a bus trip to Georgia to catalogue Mosig’s collection of foreign works on Lovecraft, was an historic moment in Joshi’s professional life—for the trajectory of his future as the conservator of weird fiction had now been set.

As Joshi skulked amid the Hay’s Lovecraftian holdings, he bumped into Paul R. and Marc A. Michaud of Necronomicon Press, whose amateur publications “suggested that the growing fan interest in Lovecraft was leading to the publication of rare and obscure materials by and about him” (What Is Anything? 87); and, secreted within the yellowed pages of an eldritch Providence newspaper (though not behind a secret panel), he discovered an heretofore unknown Lovecraft poem, “New England.” He reconnoitered the Rhode Island Historical Society’s archives for microfilms of the Providence Evening News, which he scanned for Lovecraft’s astronomical articles. S. T. Joshi had become a literary forensic detective!

Prompted by Mosig and others, he began to seek out the original manuscripts of Lovecraft’s work—for the purpose of comparing them with the Arkham editions:

I became increasingly appalled at the degree and nature of the divergences I was finding countless errors, in paragraphing and punctuation, and two short passages omitted in an early chapter. By the time I was finished with a preliminary examination, I had identified 1500 apparent errors in the Arkham House edition [of At the Mountains of Madness]. But this, I realized, was only the beginning of the process. I had to ascertain not only what the errors were, but how they had occurred. (What Is Anything? 89)

Comparing Lovecraft’s manuscripts turned out to be a six-year process.

As Lovecraftian scholars forged relationships and worked on joint and solo projects, Joshi copied, by hand, all the letters written by and about H. P. Lovecraft that were contained within the friable pages of antient Weird Tales magazines in the Hay; in 1978, these letters would be published by Necronomicon Press as H. P. Lovecraft in “The Eyrie.” And, when he learned that, following the writer’s death, Lovecraft’s Aunt Annie Gamwell asked a friend to prepare a list of Lovecraft’s books in order to sell them—and that the outcome of the effort was an inaccurate and nearly inscrutable inventory—Joshi leapt into action. To decipher the cryptical entries on the unfathomable list, Joshi consulted several references of published material (one tool he invoked was the 750-volume National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, which lists the holdings of every U.S. library); the end result was Joshi’s amended list of almost one thousand titles, which was published by Necronomicon Press in 1980 as Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue. Joshi then began the labor of the next four decades—the recovery, transcription, and publication of letters to and from Lovecraft—for in the letters he had discovered unpublished riches that illuminate Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought. Because of their disputed ownership, however, he was not permitted to xerox the letters, and so he was forced to hand-copy thousands of pages of correspondence. In a move worthy of a gumshoe, a frustrated Joshi suffering from writers’ cramp smuggled a selection of letters out of the library (the letters were only photocopies, he assures the reader, for the originals are kept in a vault) to make photocopies of the photocopies; later, he returned them to the archives, before they were missed! In 1978, he attended his first conventions, Boskone (science fiction) and IguanaCon (fantasy and science fiction); and, by Mosig’s invitation, he was a panelist at IguanaCon, with Lovecraftian giants J. Vernon Shea, Donald R. Burleson, Fritz Leiber, and Mosig. A one-hour panel stretched to three hours!

Joshi’s star continued to ascend: in 1980, he published Index to the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s Library, Uncollected Prose and Poetry II, and H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades in Criticism. As he wrote criticism at Brown, Joshi recognized a need for venues dedicated specifically to Lovecraft and weird fiction; thus, in 1979, he and Michaud founded Lovecraft Studies (Necronomicon Press). When the John Hay Library asked Joshi to catalogue its collection of Clark Ashton Smith manuscripts, he and Michaud completed an independent study in the science of cataloguing and then completed the assignment.

Joshi compiled a to-do list for the summer between his graduation with a bachelor’s degree and his entry into the master’s program at Brown—and this sample provides an indication of how he was to spend most of the days of his life:

• Type page proofs for 4 or 5 books for Necro. Press
• Compile 1 or 2 books for Necro. Press
• Finish the Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories anthology;
• Read the rest of Horace, Catullus, and Tibullus, and perhaps the rest of Vergil’s Georgics;
• Read 8-12 books of the Odyssey in Greek;
• Learn German to the point of fluency in reading . . . (Journals 2.92),

and so forth. He had a new girlfriend, Linda Aro; and he accrued a growing circle of friends, the new Kalem Club, comprised of other Lovecraftian literati (people he met through networking, in the course of his hunt for original manuscripts and unpublished works), among them Marc A. Michaud of Necronomicon Press and other like-minded people such as Peter Cannon, Robert M. Price, Sam Gafford, T. E. D. Klein, and other “learned and dynamic individuals” (Journals 3.80). Page after page now is filled with trips to conventions, concerts, bookstores, and libraries; meeting the Lovecraftian cohort everywhere, trading documents and information among themselves; pilgrimages to Boston, Providence, Chicago, and New York in search of texts; assembling anthologies of various kinds and Lovecraftian books, writing articles for journals, studying languages and literature, history and philosophy. It sounds impossible.

An intellectual who was high on language, Joshi captured an insight that occurred to him while he was studying Latin: “My fascination with language and words per se increases daily, as I learn, using my understanding of English and French and Latin, what miraculous psychological, philosophical, and literary effects can be produced with words” (Journals 2.22).

In 1983, at summer school in England, he met his future wife, Leslie G. Boba (they would marry eighteen years later). When school resumed in the fall, Joshi decided to stop writing about Lovecraft until he had more thoroughly educated himself in general culture, philosophy, history, and literature: “Anyone who wishes to write about Lovecraft must be nearly as intelligent as Lovecraft himself” (Journals 3.56). It was during the Princeton years that the New Kalem club began meeting at O’Reilly’s, an Irish pub in New York City.

On the literary front, Joshi continued his collaboration with Marc A. Michaud and Necronomicon Press; and when Michaud experienced problems, he and Jason C. Eckhardt assumed operations of Necronomicon until Michaud was able to return to the helm. In 1984, Arkham House issued the first of four revised editions of Lovecraft—and, while the cover page continued to credit August Derleth as the editor, it included the new line “Texts Edited by S. T. Joshi” (What Is Anything? 127). Joshi microfilmed one thousand pages of letters written by Lovecraft to August Derleth, and David E. Schultz transcribed them; much later, these letters were published in two volumes by Hippocampus Press. By the time Joshi and Schultz finished compiling extant Lovecraft letters, they would fill twenty-four volumes.

What Is Anything?
What Is Anything? is S. T. Joshi’s mature retrospective of his life in Lovecraft. Through hard work, good fortune, and decades of dogged study devoted to the life and works of H. P. Lovecraft—whose radical vision not only expanded the boundaries of supernatural and horror fiction, but also shaped Joshi’s own cosmic philosophy—Joshi’s innate talents and ambitions were honed to precision. Briefly revisiting his childhood, his high school career, and his years at Brown and Princeton, Anything’s focus is Joshi’s literary and professional development through 2022. Personal milestones punctuate this narrative—Joshi’s sweethearts, his first drink, his relocation from country to city, making friends, classical music, and beloved cats—but these intimate details are treated more as embellishments to a life spent in letters. The central theme of Anything is Joshi’s pivotal role in the “remarkable ascendancy of Lovecraft, over the past half-century, to canonical status in American and world literature, as well as his establishment as an icon in popular culture; and, concurrently, the rise of weird fiction as a genre in both popularity and critical esteem” (What Is Anything? 9). In pithy verse, Joshi illustrates the philosophy of cosmic pessimism which he learned from Lovecraft:

There was a man
In a boat
At the bottom of the sea.
He was bailing water. (What Is Anything? 62)

Taking a leave of absence from Princeton in 1984, Joshi went to work for Chelsea House Publishers, New Jersey; it was the only salaried position he would ever hold. The next year he became managing editor of their Literary Criticism division, and he remained at Chelsea eleven years. In 1986, with Michaud, Joshi established a second journal, Studies in Weird Fiction, and he developed relationships with Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long, whom he induced to write a memoir of his life.

Serious scholarship does not necessarily preclude mischief. On one of their many gambols to Boston, Joshi and the Kalem gang frolicked among the stones of Copp’s Hill Burying Ground—the setting of “Pickman’s Model”—and descended into a providentially opened grave (sans a long telephone wire) to nab osseous souvenirs! To the concerned locals who gathered to investigate such suspicious activity, the Kalems offered only the explanation that they were “Lovecraft scholars,” (What Is Anything? 144) and no further questions were asked. Playing hooky from a rowdy 1986 World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Joshi clambered to the top of St. John’s Catholic Church (the setting of “The Haunter of the Dark”); what he discovered there he dares not divulge within these pages.

Necronomicon Press, meanwhile, continued to issue volumes of Lovecraft’s uncollected letters and papers, as well as Sonia Davis’s memoir, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft. After the death of Donald Wandrei (the co-owner of Arkham House), Joshi prepared The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, differentiating between “Primary Revisions” (clients’ stories written by Lovecraft nearly in their entirety) and “Secondary Revisions” (stories which Lovecraft touched up for clients).

In the 1990s, Joshi was publishing newly discovered letters piecemeal as they were uncovered, but those volumes had to be revised as soon as they were issued—because even more newly unearthed materials required insertion into the chronology. On the centennial of Lovecraft’s nativity, Joshi led the effort to erect a memorial plaque at the John Hay Library; the plaque features a quotation from Fungi from Yuggoth, a moving statement of Lovecraft’s profound love for Providence. In 1991, Necronomicon Press published The H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference: Proceedings. S. T. Joshi is rightfully proud that, as a direct result of the combined efforts of the Kalem Club and other scholars, H. P. Lovecraft was now established as a canonical writer in American literature:

After the conference, I think the Lovecraft community collectively suffered a certain amount of exhaustion. The decade and a half from 1975 to 1990 had been an unprecedented period in the history of Lovecraft studies, and the work by many fans and scholars had revolutionized our understanding of the dreamer from Providence. Not only had we overturned numerous myths about Lovecraft’s life and work (notably the incredibly erroneous views of the Cthulhu Mythos spouted over a lifetime by August Derleth), but there had been a marked accession in Lovecraft’s general reputation. A single indication, among many, of this development was a capsule review in American Literature of Burleson’s Disturbing the Universe: “It’s getting to where those who still ignore Lovecraft have to go on the defensive.” (This was the entire review.) No more was Lovecraft regarded (and scorned) as a pulp hack; his ascension into the canon of American literature was looking more and more likely, while his popular appeal had never ceased to increase since the time of the Ballantine paperback editions of the late 1960s. (What Is Anything? 161–62)

From this time, Joshi’s scholarship expanded to the writers who had influenced Lovecraft—Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James—and to Lovecraft’s heirs. With Darrell Schweitzer, Joshi plunged into Dunsany, their combined efforts culminating in a bibliography of Dunsany; a critical study, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (Greenwood Press, 1995); and, eventually, a 2014 invitation to visit Dunsany Castle, to catalogue the manuscripts in its possession, many of them not yet published.

Joshi devoted the years 1993–95 to an examination of Lovecraft’s life—and, in 1996, Necronomicon Press published S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. That volume was abridged; but, fourteen years later, an unabridged and updated version appeared as I Am Providence (Hippocampus Press, 2010), a definitive two-volume work that corrects the multitude of sins of de Camp and others. This biography has now been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Russian, with a Chinese translation in the works.

Laid off from a defunct Chelsea House in 1995, Joshi became a full-time freelance writer, editing books for mainstream presses, such as the Dover editions of classic literature (these include Kipling’s weird tales and Blackwood’s John Silence stories). Sixty Years of Arkham House (a listing—with a full table of contents—of all the books published by Arkham House and its subsidiary imprints) was Joshi’s final publication for Arkham House. Joshi went on to edit collections of weird fiction for Penguin, Tartarus Press, Ash-Tree Press, Chaosium, and other publishing houses—as well as many nonfiction studies of weird fiction for various university presses. The release of the Library of America Lovecraft in 2005 (edited by Peter Straub, who used Joshi’s corrected texts and annotations) is considered the moment of Lovecraft’s canonization.

In the new century, the rescue and publication of Lovecraft’s letters remains Joshi’s main focus. In 2007, the University of Tampa Press released Joshi’s O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, and, with Hippocampus, Joshi published Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth and Robert E. Howard. Joshi continues to issue volumes of letters and anthologies, and to edit Lovecraftian and Weird journals (Lovecraft Annual, Spectral Realms, and Penumbra). His own bibliography is book-length.

With more than four hundred books to his name, Joshi continues to publish Lovecraftian and Weird fiction and nonfiction with various mainstream publishers, but mainly with Hippocampus Press, a collaborative enterprise with Derrick Hussey. In other realms, Joshi has done, and continues to do, extensive work on H. L. Mencken; and he publishes on religion (he’s against it) and atheism (he’s for it) and various matters of social conscience for Prometheus Books. He is at work on an enormous history of atheism in the West, entitled The Downfall of God, for Pitchstone Publishing, the first of two volumes of which will appear in summer or fall 2024. Joshi regards this project as his greatest intellectual enterprise.

Joshi’s work on a single author, Mencken, represents the unique nature of his body of literary achievements:

Mencken work continued apace. I decided to assemble a new bibliography of Mencken based on all the work I had done in gathering up his fugitive writing. Richard J. Schrader had already prepared a meticulous bibliography (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), but this focused almost exclusively on Mencken’s book publications. Aside from that, scholars had to rely on Betty Adler’s old and inadequate compilation from 1961. So I set about the task, listing Mencken’s 92 books, 15 edited books, 1074 magazine articles, 2346 signed newspaper articles (and hundreds—or perhaps thousands—of unsigned editorials that I had discovered he had written), and much else besides. The book came out as H. L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 2009). I did not have room to include Mencken criticism, which would really require another whole volume. (What is Anything? 271)

His Mencken bibliography is the outcome of a decade spent compiling Mencken’s publications from libraries all over the country. Incredibly, Joshi has transcribed the totality of Mencken’s published work, amounting to 12 million words. Out of this body of work he has published volumes of Mencken’s autobiographical writings (2010), collected poetry (2009), and collected plays and stories (2012).

Having devoted his life to the preservation of fine literature, Joshi is incensed by the adulteration of Lovecraft’s (and other authors’) works—at the hands of August Derleth and a legion of ghoulishly conscience-deficient writers and publishers. He also is roused to fury by the publication and exaltation (under the democratic, yet blatantly inaccurate, rubric of “literature”) of less-than-excellent writing that panders to the anorexic aesthetic and low-intellectual tastes of the masses (i.e., popular fiction, such titles as usually infest bestseller lists). Joshi’s expression of a just anger is the source of his reputation in some quarters as a vicious reviewer. He terms this style “satirical criticism” (What Is Anything? 234). Certainly, and with good reason, Joshi takes a hard stance on behalf of the value of literary excellence—and at the 2003 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (an academic gathering), his lecture on the literary canon rubbed them wrong:

My own address as Distinguished Critic, entitled “Establishing the Canon of Weird Fiction,” appears to have ruffled a few feathers—not so much for my nose-thumbing of Stephen King and Clive Barker as for my temerity at engaging in such an elitist and anti-democratic business at attempting to establish a canon of weird writing at all. Evidently, in the opinion of some members, actually passing an evaluative judgment on the merits (or lack of them) of a literary work or author was somehow beyond the bounds of a critic’s function—in spite of the fact that, as I took pains to point out, the very word criticism is derived from a Greek verb meaning “to judge” or “to distinguish.” (What is Anything? 236)

The stars were not right in 2013, a year blackened in the annals of literature by infighting among the weird fiction community—and Joshi took heat when he criticized John D. Haefele for his:

 regressive attempt to re-enshrine August Derleth’s flawed interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos (as an echo of the Christian mythos, as a battle between good and evil, and so on) after it had already been annihilated by Richard L Tierney, Dirk W. Mosig, and others. But because I was—and had been for decades—the chief spokesman of this ‘anti- Derlethian’ approach’ Haefele directed his guns on me . . . what Haefele was really trying to do was to do was to overturn the central pillars of Lovecraft scholarship as they had been unequivocally and irrefutably established over the past half century—and that was something I could not tolerate. (What Is Anything? 298)

He called out Roger Luckhurst (whose Oxford University Press collection of Lovecraft’s stories uses “the uncorrected Arkham House texts”) (What Is Anything? 299); and, when he wrote unfavorable reviews of their latest pieces, he angered the followers of Laird Barron and Scott Nicolay. Joshi places some of the blame for the embarrassing behavior of America’s literati on social media cliques (he shuns social media, the bane of considered intellectual discussion of complex issues in any topic). When Nicolay’s fans hissed vituperations, Jason Brock defended Joshi’s right to his own opinion—and the opposition responded with ad hominem attacks and name-calling (“lap-dog” and “Svengali,” etc.), a rather sophomoric literary debate for a gathering of the intelligentsia of the humanities.

Joshi says that:

None of this would be worth recording if it did not lead to a slightly . . . more significant kerfuffle—the blatantly manufactured dispute over the appropriateness of the bust of Lovecraft (designed by Graham Wilson) that served as the World Fantasy Award. This controversy was apparently initiated by one Daniel José Older, a young New York writer (I use the term loosely) who seemed so startled by the revelation of Lovecraft’s racism that he began lobbying for the bust to be discarded or changed . . . Now Lovecraft’s racism has been known for many      decades, and so I was reminded of the old joke of the Christian and the Jew:

A Christian meets a Jew and beats him up. When the Jew says, “Why did you do that?” the Christian says in a rage, “Because the Jews killed Christ!” When the Jew asks, “But wasn’t that a long time ago?” the Christian replies, “Maybe—but I just heard about it!”

At first, I laughed at the whole business, because it seemed so preposterous . . . But the unfortunate part about the whole business is that those people, like Barron, Nicolay, and others, whom I had already offended by my candour, now took up the anti-Lovecraft cause, chiefly as a way of gaining vengeance on me, as I was Lovecraft’s chief scholar and champion. (What Is Anything? 300–301)

At the 2014 World Fantasy Convention, in an informal poll, a majority of the attendees voted to retain the bust. Later, the World Fantasy Committee, led by David G. Hartwell and Ellen Datlow, “decided to scrap the statue” (What Is Anything? 301). Joshi never attended another World Fantasy Convention.

An ardent defender of civil rights, Joshi explains that “the average person (and that includes many weird writers) has little or no knowledge of history. If we were suddenly to be prohibited from recognising the merits of every historical individual who had some character flaw, we would not recognise very many people from the past—or, indeed, from the present” (What Is Anything? 302). He gave back his two World Fantasy Awards and posted an open letter to Hartwell online. Many in the fantasy community—including Ramsey Campbell and Caitlin R. Kiernan—rose to his defense, and the London Guardian reported on the controversy. H. P. Lovecraft resides yet in his place of honor, and W. W. Norton issued a new annotated edition of his works in 2014, which garnered favorable reviews.

Joshi, who has mellowed considerably with age and experience, has not forsaken his principles. He has mentored legions of fledgling writers who have made their own mark in the field of weird fiction (Jonathan Thomas, Michael Aronovitz, and Joseph Pulver, Sr. among them). In addition to his scholarly work, he has published a few detective novels. He currently resides in Seattle with his wife Mary and feline Mimi. Joshi could write a book about just his life with his felidae, or the adventures of the New Kalem Club. I have been obliged to touch very lightly on Joshi’s personal life, for matters of space, but the interested reader may find more toothsome details of both his personal and professional endeavors within these autobiographical volumes. Joshi still works at a frenetic pace and is looking forward to the publication of his five hundred book.

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