Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a prominent horror author of the 1920s and 1930s, who helped pioneer the cosmic horror genre. Lovecraft’s racism is well known, but most of the literature on Lovecraft is from literary scholars, not historians, and the works which attempt to connect Lovecraft to his times are lacking. His many letters have been overlooked as historical sources, and many authors perpetuate a false belief that Lovecraft repudiated his racism as he grew older. Lovecraft engaged with a variety of different beliefs about race, such as a racist interpretation of eugenics, anti-immigration nativism, and scientific racism. Lovecraft did undergo a shift in how he perceived certain racial groups such as Poles and Italians, shifting slightly from a biological understanding of race to a more cultural one (which focused on inherited traditions, customs, and values common to a particular race), but this shift did not apply to African Americans, whom Lovecraft still considered biologically inferior up until his death in 1937.