Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner Book

Rheinhart Kleiner (1892-1949) was one of H. P. Lovecraft's earliest correspondents. The recipient of the first issue of Lovecraft's amateur paper, the Conservative, in 1915, Kleiner challenged Lovecraft to reconsider his dogmatic views on race, literature, and society.A poet of exquisite skill and sensitivity, Kleiner inspired Lovecraft to write a number of poems directly addressed to him or inspired by his own poems. This volume prints, for the first time, the complete surviving letters of Lovecraft to Kleiner, showing how Lovecraft gradually transformed himself from an eighteenth-century fossil to a participant in the society and culture of his time.The letters address such wide-ranging subjects as erotic love, racial prejudice, the art of poetry, Lovecraft's boyhood and upbringing, and much else. Also included are the three surviving letters of the Kleicomolo, the round-robin correspondence group whose members included Kleiner, Lovecraft, Ira A. Cole, and Maurice W. Moe. Richly philosophical, these letters display the fundamentals of Lovecraft's distinctive cosmic vision.In an extensive appendix are found all of Lovecraft's and Kleiner's poems addressed to each other, along with Kleiner's several provocative essays on Lovecraft.Meticulously edited and annotated by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, this volume continues Hippocampus Press's series of unabridged Lovecraft letters, with detailed notes and commentary.