It feels odd that while Lovecraft's racism is often the first thing the mind jumps to when discussing him, the same isn't really true for other prominent pulp authors. Especially considering Edgar Rice Burroughs whole oeuvre is a celebration of white supremacy and eugenics. Tarzan boasts that he's a "killer of beasts and many black men." Utopias that have bred out crime through execution or sterilization of criminals' families are a repeated staple of his fiction. It wasn't just his fiction either; the man wrote a newspaper column calling for the killing of "moral imbeciles" and their families [source].
Its not like they were writing in wildly different times; the first Tarzan book came out only seven years before Lovecraft's Dagon. And they both were incredibly influential and celebrated figures in specific genre niches that still command wide attention. But while his racism isn't unknown, it doesn't seem to be attached to Burrough's public character in the same way it is for Lovecraft. Why doesn't he have multiple generations of pulp fans coming to terms with how the author they idolize is awful? Are there just not enough people reading A Princess of Mars these days?
Well, yes, pretty much.
But also because Lovecraft's racism is more front-and-center, and harder to ignore, I think?
Yeah, I think it's because Lovecraft and Howard are the only pulp authors that people still actually read. Burroughs is well known for his concepts, but how many people actually sit down and read Tarzan? Princess of Mars has a bit more of an audience, but Barsoom is still a niche read even though John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and his Martian races are fairly widely known. Some characters, like Bulldog Drummond and Fu Manchu are known, but nobody's going back to those stories.
"Lovecraft was especially racist even for his day" is a commonly repeated statement from people who haven't actually sat down and read many old pulp shorts and novels. Because oof, it's all pretty bad on that front
I smell @comicaurora reference
From my angle, I think Lovecraft's racism is more analytical low-hanging fruit because it's really interlaced with the entire core of his horror writing. It's clearly all very genuine fear coming from his genuine horror at the unknown, and since his Horror Of Unknowable Monsters and his Horror Of People I'm Unfamiliar With clearly occupy the same space in his mind and his writing, it's much harder for an audience to mentally separate them. He's also tremendously unsubtle about it, which could help make it easier to spot than some of the more insidious genre underpinnings from similarly fucked-up Big Names.
They're also revisited by modern audiences more frequently, maybe because the cosmic horror element of his writing is seen to hold up better than many early installments in other genres. Personal prejudices inextricable from the genuinely solid horror writing that still gets airplay today means a modern audience curious about The Call Of Cthulhu gets directly firehose'd with "oh shit that did NOT age well" from Lovecraft much more directly than other comparable authors they aren't intentionally seeking out.
He also feels comparatively like a bigger fish in a smaller genre pond; it's called "Lovecraftian Horror", but you don't get so much "Burroughs-ian Adventure" these days. Those other early writers feel easier to depersonalize away from the later installments of the genres they contributed to, which means their personal fuckeries get disregarded or quietly pared down in later adaptations.
That said, Princess Weekes did a very good video unpacking the tremendously deep roots of white supremacy in sci-fi and spec fic. It's an enlightening watch, especially for people who haven't dug into the foundational genre texts.
