After reading several of Peter Elbow’s essays, I got to thinking about a New England writer I’ve read and reread plenty over the years.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a pioneer in supernatural and science fiction writing, had a poor attendance record at school and stopped attending altogether at around age eight. Years later, he wanted to go to Brown but for several reasons he couldn’t make it happen. So from childhood on his study was as self-guided as his writing. Adhering to many of Elbow’s principles well before Elbow expressed them seems to have made Lovecraft the idiosyncratic and original writer he became. This Elbow would have probably admired if Lovecraft had been the subject of much study when Elbow was in academia. However, given that Elbow’s ideology was driven to a large extent by the progressive social thinking of the sixties and seventies, he would undoubtedly have found Lovecraft’s racial perspectives particularly abhorrent (as would anyone).