H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) enjoys a posthumous fame with few parallels in literary history. To read about the spinner of weird tales and longtime Providence, R.I., resident is to wonder whether he entered into a Faustian bargain. Something like this, perhaps:

You will have a short life, plagued by money woes, professional failure, fights with your editors, marital problems, family tragedy, ill health, existential crises, and suicidal thoughts, and will never see much of your work in print. But, decades after you die, your work will receive immense academic attention and become a pop-culture phenomenon, so much so that an adjective derived from your name will enter into popular parlance, and people will use the term Lovecraftian in reference to scenarios where someone comes up against bizarre, menacing forces from the outer reaches of a cosmos so nebulous and scary that to try to fathom it is to court insanity.

The latest bout of academic attention comes from John L. Steadman’s new study Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales. It comes just months after David J. Goodwin’s Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham. The long-overdue latter work provides an account of the two years that Lovecraft spent in New York City, with the love of his life, Sonia H. Greene, who resided in Flatbush, and at his apartment at 169 Clinton Street. Goodwin shows how Lovecraft’s antiquarian interests and passion for the history and architecture of New York, Greenwich Village in particular, inform his tales, and how his experiences in the polyglot city helped spawn what the academic discourse on Lovecraft increasingly dwells on: his racism.

In keeping with this discourse, Steadman’s book unites an analysis of the bigotry expressed in certain Lovecraft stories and letters with the theory of “white fragility,” whose popularizer is author and speaker Robin DiAngelo.

Steadman’s focus and publisher (Bloomsbury) convey the flourishing scholarly fixation on Lovecraft. This may please those who do not want his work to become as obscure as so much of the weird fiction from the 1920s and ’30s. Alas, though Steadman’s view of his subject does not lack all nuance, he shoehorns Lovecraft into the dogmatic and academically au courant critical race theory.

Look elsewhere for an in-depth biography. His scholarly tone notwithstanding, Steadman takes up the facts of Lovecraft’s life and times only briefly in the opening chapter, instead recommending other authors, such as S. T. Joshi, author of the authoritative Lovecraft biography I Am Providence.

Some facts are necessary to lay out, even cursorily. Lovecraft was born in Providence, R.I., to a relatively well-off family, benefiting from grandfather Whipple Phillips’s management of the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company, which oversaw a dam on the Bruneau River in Idaho. For a time, the company did well. Lovecraft’s father, Winfield, suffered a mental breakdown in 1893 and died of syphilis a few years later, when Lovecraft was just seven, leaving his mother (Susie) and his two unmarried aunts to care for him. Still, Steadman’s account of Lovecraft’s upbringing makes it seem like something out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. He has toys galore and gets telescopes and astronomy sets just by asking. The indulgence of his budding tastes and interests sets the stage for the emergence of a precocious antiquarian, classicist, translator, inquirer into profound questions of space and time, and contributor to the amateur press.

But Steadman adapts and distorts these desultory opening data to support his questionable attempts at sociocultural theorizing. He invokes DiAngelo’s definition of “white fragility” as a mindset in which any discussion or even mention of supposed advantages that white people in our society enjoy triggers a range of defensive reactions including anger, shame, arguing, and abrupt withdrawal from the conversation. White fragility, DiAngelo believes, is not the reaction of normal people to the kind of collective guilt and stereotyping that everyone, progressives especially, have told us we must reject categorically. No, it’s one of the critical mechanisms for the preservation of white advantage, domination, and repression of others.

In this light, Lovecraft becomes a “poster boy” for white fragility. Growing up in a privileged milieu, he became accustomed to getting whatever he wanted just by asking and to being one of the world’s blessed. Then when Whipple’s land-irrigation firm in Idaho collapsed because of flooding, Lovecraft reacted to his family’s suddenly dire financial straits the way that DiAngelo says white people invariably do: by growing defensive and hostile to the non-whites they believe themselves entitled to dominate.

Here, in Steadman’s view, is the source of the racism that emerges in stories such as “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “Arthur Jermyn,” and “The Lurking Fear,” with their references to demographic change and newcomers from various parts of the world, and in the many letters Lovecraft wrote to correspondents, friends, and Sonia H. Greene. Lovecraft’s mindset, in Steadman’s telling, is that of a spoiled child. If the formerly entitled white boy can’t be king of the playground, then he will scream and cry and do his best to belittle others and make their lives hell.

It is not hard to undermine Steadman’s argument. Joshi’s I Am Providence details just how susceptible Whipple’s fortunes were to the vagaries of nature, as floods wrecked the dam twice. Whipple Phillips was just an entrepreneur who enjoyed a temporary, speculative, and contingent prosperity. When his venture failed, there were no white people ready to help him turn his life around and reclaim a socially dominant position. No one cared.

If the mild prosperity that the Lovecraft family enjoyed came to such a dramatic and irrevocable end from something as abrupt and arbitrary as harsh weather, then it seems reasonable to ask just how thoroughly the social order of late-19th- and early-20th-century America was rigged for their benefit. Their prosperity was precarious, superficial, wiped out in flash, in no way assured by an economic and political dispensation systemically favoring whites. As black families knew, the racism of the time was real and ghastly, but to link the terms “white” and “privilege” so facilely, as if all whites lived a privileged existence, ignores a vastly complex social reality.

Another problem for Steadman is a simple fact: Lovecraft, the supposed bigot and vicious antisemite, married a Jewish lady, Sonia H. Greene. Whatever crude asides he may have made in his letters, and whatever ugly thoughts may have entered his mind at times, nothing stopped him from recognizing and appreciating the charm, talent, intelligence, and beauty of someone who, again according to the logic of fragility, we would expect him to have despised.

When it comes to understanding Lovecraft’s relationship with Greene, and his attitudes more generally, Goodwin’s Midnight Rambles, mentioned above, is more useful than Steadman. The Lovecraft and Greene we follow in Goodwin’s pages worked together. Lovecraft once misplaced his only typed copy of a story he had ghostwritten for the magician Harry Houdini. It could have been the biggest disaster of Lovecraft’s career. But he and Greene found a small office with a typewriter for rent in a downtown Philadelphia building. Lovecraft typed the story while Greene read it to him aloud; they produced a new version. Whatever Lovecraft may have said in private letters, how much did he care, on that occasion, about his beloved partner’s ethnicity or religion? Lovecraft said things in his letters too horrible to repeat. But here we see a dynamic similar to what we have long known about life in the Army, or a society under siege: People with interests and goals in common have a way of overcoming superficial differences.

Sadly, the marriage did not last. Steadman would have you believe that the New England WASP gave his Jewish partner the boot when his white fragility kicked in. But here again, the truth is quite different. As Goodwin has observed, the marriage ended when Lovecraft had found his stride as a writer of weird tales. It was Greene, not he, who pressed for divorce.

Those who seek to cancel Lovecraft for his racism are not just selective about the details of his life and writings. They get this unique and beguiling writer’s philosophical orientation profoundly wrong. No less a figure than Joyce Carol Oates has praised the cosmic resonance of his most eloquent tales and the sense of “existential loneliness” that they evoke.

Hand in hand with that quality goes an intellectual curiosity so deep that Joshi, quoting one of Lovecraft’s many letters, entitled one of the chapters of his magnificent biography “What of Unknown Africa?” The question conveys Lovecraft’s lifelong tendency not to withdraw into the hermetic bubble of a privileged white New Englander, but rather the opposite: to gaze ever outward at realms, worlds, planes, and dimensions with an eagerness to explore, indeed embrace, what is different from his own milieu.

Just read the opening of a story such as “The Silver Key.” It details the frustrations of a protagonist, Randolph Carter, who feels confined because he can no longer make “nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas.”

Regardless of how many failures and frustrations H. P. Lovecraft experienced in his truncated life — no matter how harsh the terms of the Faustian bargain — a writer so often dismissed or disparaged as a narrow-minded bigot never lost his deep curiosity and passion for the unknown.