S T Joshi

Literary criticism

Joshi discovered Lovecraft when he was 13 in the public library in Muncie, Indiana. He read L. Sprague de Camp's biography of Lovecraft, Lovecraft: A Biography, on publication in 1975 and began thereafter to devote himself to the study of Lovecraft, guided in this by scholars such as Dirk W. Mosig, J. Vernon Shea and George Wetzel. He also wrote some Lovecraftian fiction such as the story "The Recurring Doom", which can be found in Robert M. Price's anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu.

Joshi received a B.A. (1980) and M.A. (1982) in classics at Brown University, primarily because of the holdings of Lovecraft books and manuscripts in the John Hay Library. He later did graduate work at Princeton University from 1982 to 1984, where he was the recipient of the Paul Elmer More fellowship in classical philosophy. Appalled at finding literally 1,500 textual errors in his favorite Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness, he devoted years of research consulting manuscripts and early publications to establish the textual history of Lovecraft's works, in order to prepare corrected editions of Lovecraft's collected fiction, revisions and miscellaneous writings in collaboration with Jim Turner for Arkham House; they were published in five volumes between 1984 and 1995.

His literary criticism focuses upon readability and exploration of the dominant worldviews of the authors in question. His The Weird Tale looks at six acknowledged masters of horror and fantasy (namely Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Bierce and Lovecraft), and discusses their respective worldviews in depth and with authority.

A follow-up volume, The Modern Weird Tale, examines the work of modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar philosophically oriented viewpoint. The third of what amounts to a critical trilogy on the weird tale, The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004), includes essays on Dennis Etchison, L. P. Hartley, Les Daniels, E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, L. P. Davies, Edward Lucas White, Rod Serling, Poppy Z. Brite and others. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (published in two volumes, 2012 by PS Publishing) is a comprehensive history of supernatural fiction from Gilgamesh to the present day.

In August 2014, Joshi strongly criticized author Daniel José Older after the latter started a campaign to change the World Fantasy Award statuette from a bust of Lovecraft to one of African-American author Octavia Butler. Older claimed Lovecraft's image was unacceptable because of his racism; in response, Joshi stated "“the WFA bust acknowledges Lovecraft’s literary status in the field of weird fiction and nothing more. It says nothing about Lovecraft’s personality or character." Joshi also argued that the critics of Lovecraft were ignoring “the significant question as to whether racism should be regarded as so much more significant a moral, intellectual, and personal flaw than many other stances one could name”, and argued that it was incorrect to think “that Lovecraft’s undeniable racism somehow negates his immense talents as a writer and also negates the many virtues – intellectual, aesthetic, and personal – that he displayed over his life”. Journalist Laura Miller took issue with Joshi's arguments, stating Joshi "is essentially telling writers like Okorafor that they must accept an honour from that community in the form of a man who considered [black people] to be ‘semi-human’ and filled ‘with vice’. Suck it up, or get out. I’m pretty sure this is not the message the World Fantasy Convention meant to send when they gave Okorafor the prize in the first place."

Magazines edited

In 1987, Joshi became the fifth Official Editor of the EOD amateur press association (see Esoteric Order of Dagon), an organisation devoted to the study of H.P. Lovecraft particularly but which also examines weird and fantasy fiction in all its forms.

Joshi edited the journals Lovecraft Studies (1979–2001) and Studies in Weird Fiction (1986–2005), both published by Necronomicon Press; and Studies in the Fantastic (2008–09), published by the University of Tampa Press. He is editor of Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press; 2010), and the Hippocampus Press journals Spectral Realms (from 2014);Lovecraft Annual (from 2007); Nemesis (from 2016). He was formerly co-editor of Dead Reckonings (from 2007).

Editions of Lovecraft's letters

Joshi and his editorial collaborator David E. Schultz have edited many volumes of Lovecraft's letters to individuals: for Necronomicon Press (including those to Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett); for Night Shade Books (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: Letters to Donald Wandrei) and Letters from New York; and for University of Tampa Press (O Fortunate Floridian: Letters to Robert H. Barlow). Joshi and Schultz are now progressively issuing volumes of H. P. Lovecraft's letters to individual correspondents through Hippocampus Press. Volumes already issued include Lovecraft's letters to Rheinhart Kleiner; Alfred Galpin; August Derleth (2 volumes); Robert E. Howard (2 volumes); James F. Morton; Elizabeth Toldridge & Anne Tillery Renshaw; F. Lee Baldwin, Duane Rimel & Nils Frome; J. Vernon Shea, Carl F. Strauch & Lee McBride White; and Robert Bloch.

Other works

Joshi edited the five-volume set of Lovecraft's Collected Essays issued by Hippocampus Press from 2004-2006. He edited two annotated volumes of Lovecraft's best work for Dell books (the second with Peter H. Cannon). He and David E. Schultz edited the collected poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, issued by Hippocampus Press (3 volumes, 2007–2008) and the collected poetry of George Sterling (3 volumes, 2013).

Joshi was general editor of a line of original Cthulhu Mythos works from Perilous Press, including works by Michael Shea and Brian Stableford. The first publication was Shea's Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2009), with Stableford's volume titled The Womb of Time (two Mythos novellas).

A bibliography of William Hope Hodgson (co-compiled by Joshi with Sam Gafford and Mike Ashley) appears in Massimo Berruti, S. T. Joshi and Sam Gafford (eds). William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland.NY: Hippocampus Press, 2014, pp. 205–302.

Social and atheist criticism

Joshi has also edited books on atheism and social relations, including Documents of American Prejudice (1999), an annotated collection of American racist writings; In Her Place (2006), which collects written examples of prejudice against women; and Atheism: A Reader (2000), which collects atheistic writings by, among others, Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others. An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by Isaac Asimov, John William Draper, Albert Einstein, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss Lamont, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Westermarck, was published in 2007.

Joshi is also the author of God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003), an anti-religious polemic against various writers including C. S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jr., William James, Stephen L. Carter, Annie Dillard, Reynolds Price, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Guenter Lewy, Neale Donald Walsch and Jerry Falwell, which is dedicated to theologian and fellow Lovecraft critic Robert M. Price. In 2006 he published The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong, which criticized the political writings of such commentators as William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, David and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol and William Kristol, arguing that the values of the American people have become steadily more liberal over time.

In 2011, Joshi was named the editor-in-chief of The American Rationalist magazine, beginning with the July/August 2011 issue.

Personal life

Joshi was raised in Illinois and Indiana. After attending Brown University, he settled in the New York City area, where he was a senior editor at Chelsea House Publishers. Currently he lives in Seattle, Washington. Joshi married Leslie Gary Boba on September 1, 2001. They divorced in December 2010.

He wed Mary Krawczak Wilson in July, 2014 at a private ceremony in Seattle, WA.

Awards

He has since returned his awards from the World Fantasy Convention for their decision to discontinue use of the bust of H.P. Lovecraft as the basis for their awards.