HP Lovecraft's racism most definitely drove his writing and not in small ways. It courses through his narratives. The Shadow over Innsmouth, for instance, is literally entirely about the evils of cross-breeding with "lesser" people. The whole and full picture of terror from "the other" wouldn't gel as it does in his stories without his starkly racist ideas about the world.
That doesn't invalidate his art, in fact I think a knowledge of his profound racism adds another level of terror to his stories, in the realization that racism is a primordial horror that can and does haunt us all. To wave all this away by claiming he was simply a "product of his time" is to profoundly misunderstand his writings.
I read a lot of Lovecraft as a young teenager, and it was only years later that popular culture started to call out his racism. When it started to gain traction, I remember thinking, "um... well, duh."
Lovecraft is interesting in that regard. His racism is so interwoven with what makes the books good, that there is no real way to read one without the other.
It is far more problematic with authors where the trait that is later "discovered" always seemed like an alien stain in their work. E.g. someone who wrote all about freedom and equality, but has some weird misogynistic moments in the books that everybody glossed over before, but now they stain the whole idea..
That doesn't invalidate his art, in fact I think a knowledge of his profound racism adds another level of terror to his stories, in the realization that racism is a primordial horror that can and does haunt us all. To wave all this away by claiming he was simply a "product of his time" is to profoundly misunderstand his writings.
I read a lot of Lovecraft as a young teenager, and it was only years later that popular culture started to call out his racism. When it started to gain traction, I remember thinking, "um... well, duh."