S. T. Joshi

S. T. Joshi

S. T. Joshi (2002 promotional photo)
Born June 22, 1958 (1958-06-22) (age 53)
Pune, India
Occupation Critic, Editor, Historian
Nationality United States since 1978
Subjects H. P. Lovecraft, Horror, Fantasy, Atheism, Contemporary Politics, Women's Studies, H. L. Mencken

stjoshi.org

Sunand Tryambak Joshi (b. 22 June 1958 in Pune, India) — known as S. T. Joshi — is an award-winning Indian American literary critic, novelist, and a leading figure in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors of weird and fantastic fiction. Besides having written what critics such as Harold Bloom and Joyce Carol Oates consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols, 2010 [originally published in one volume as H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, 1996]),[1][2] Joshi has prepared (with David E. Schultz) several annotated editions of works by Ambrose Bierce. He has also written on crime novelist John Dickson Carr and on Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, and has edited collections of their works, as well as collections of the best work of several other weird writers. He is a significant bibliographer, having compiled bibliographies of Lovecraft, Bierce, Dunsany, Ramsey Campbell, William Hope Hodgson (forthcoming), Ray Bradbury and Clark Ashton Smith. He has been general editor of the Horror Classics series for Dover Publications. Most recently he has turned his attention to collecting and editing the works of H. L. Mencken. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington.

Contents

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.[3] 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 elected to become a freshman at Brown University primarily because of the holdings of Lovecraft books and manuscripts in the John Hay Library.[4] He later did graduate work at Princeton University. Appalled at finding literally 1500 textual errors in his favourite 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.[4]

His literary criticism is notable for its emphases upon readability and 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. Aside from his biography of Lovecraft, Joshi regards this book as his most notable achievement to date.[5]

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.

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 has maintained this role for over twenty years and is currently still Official Editor.

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 also the editor of Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press, 2010-), and Lovecraft Annual (2007- ) and co-editor of Dead Reckonings (2007 - ), journals published by Hippocampus Press.

Editions of Lovecraft's Letters

Joshi and his edtorial collaborator David E. Schultz have edited many volumes of Lovecraft's letters to individuals - for Necronomicon Press (including those to Richard F. Searight, 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 David E. 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 Rheinhardt Kleiner, Alfred Galpin, August Derleth(2 vols) and Robert E. Howard(2 vols). There may be twenty or more volumes of Lovecraft's letters in this series. The next issued are likely to be Lovecraft's letters to James F. Morton (forthcoming, 2010), probably followed by those to Clark Ashton Smith.

Other Work including Volumes Forthcoming

Joshi edited the five-volume set of Lovecraft's Collected Essays issued by Hippocampus Press from 2004-2007. He edited two annotated volumes of Lovecraft's best work for Dell books (the second with Peter H. Cannon).

Joshi and David E. Schultz edited the collected poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, issued by Hippocampus Press (3 vols) (2007–2008), Joshi is working on the collected poetry of George Sterling.

Forthcoming works (some of which are discussed on Joshi's blog at his official website - see below) also include Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (to be published in two volumes, 2011 & 2012 by PS Publishing); and Encyclopedia of the Vampire (Greenwood Press); Horror Fiction Index; a three-volume edition of the letters of Ambrose Bierce; bibliographies of William Hope Hodgson (with Sam Gafford and Mike Ashley) and of Clark Ashton Smith; The White People and Other Weird Tales by Arthur Machen(for Penguin Classics); Essential Writings by Ambrose Bierce (Library of America, forthcoming 2011); a comprehensive bibliography of Ray Bradbury (with Jon Eller); a revised/updated edition of the Ramsey Campbell bibliography The Core of Ramsey Campbell; and an edition of the correspondence between Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth.

Joshi will also edit an exhaustively annotated edition of Lovecraft's work for Bloodletting Press, to appear in two volumes (2011 and 2012).

Joshi is general editor of a new 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).

Joshi has been asked by film director Guillermo del Toro to act as a consultant on del Toro's long-mooted film project, a cinematic version of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro will also contribute an introduction to Joshi's edition of Arthur Machen's tales for Penguin Classics.

Joshi is also working on editions of work by Robert Aickman (including Aickman's unpublished novel Go Back at Once), Maurice Level and John Metcalfe.

Social and atheist criticism

In addition to literary 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 such people as Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others. An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by such writers as 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 criticised 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 and Irving and William Kristol, arguing that, despite the efforts of right-wing polemicists, the values of the American people have become steadily more liberal over time.

In 2011, Joshi has been named the editor-in-chief of The American Rationalist Magazine, beginning with the July/August 2011 issue. The American Rationalist, billed as "The alternative to superstition and nonsense", is published by the Center for Inquiry.[6]

Personal life

Joshi formerly resided in New York City. He is a former senior editor at Chelsea House Publishers. Currently he lives in Seattle, Washington.[5] Joshi married Leslie Gary Boba on September 1, 2001.[5] They divorced in December 2010.[7]

Bibliography

Books Written

On H.P. Lovecraft & the Cthulhu Mythos

Other Books Written

Books Edited

Editions of Works by or About H.P. Lovecraft & the Cthulhu Mythos

Editions of Works by Others, Reference Works, etc

Books Translated

Foreign Editions

Novels

The title has since been reprinted under Joshi's own name.

Introductions & Forewords

Magazines Edited

Reviews

Joshi has regularly reviewed in the horror field for the journals he has edited (see above). In addition he reviewed for Necropsy: The Review of Horror Fiction, (edited by June Pulliam) the online sister journal to the print journal Necrofile (see above). Joshi's Necropsy reviews are archived at: http://www.lsu.edu/necrofile/sindex_reviewers.htm

Awards

References

Notes

  1. ^ "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life". The H.P. Lovecraft Archive. http://www.hplovecraft.com/study/bios/hplalife.asp. Retrieved 2009-02-15. 
  2. ^ Joyce Carol Oates (October 31, 1996). "The King of Weird". The New York Review of Books 43 (17). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1376. Retrieved 2009-02-15. 
  3. ^ Will Murray, "S.T. Joshi: Re-editor". Dagon 24 (Jan-Mar 1989), p. 24
  4. ^ a b Will Murray, "S.T. Joshi: Re-editor". Dagon 24 (Jan-Mar 1989), p. 25
  5. ^ a b c "S.T. Joshi: An Autobiography". http://www.stjoshi.org/biography.html. Retrieved 2011-01-12. 
  6. ^ The American Rationalist volume LVII May/June 2011, Number 3
  7. ^ http://stjoshi.org/news.html
  8. ^ Joshi, S. T. (17 August 2010). "S. T. Joshi as Fiction Writer". http://stjoshi.org/fiction.html. Retrieved 17 August 2010. 

External links