Free Audiobook: A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson by H.P. Lovecraft

Read Along Link: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rdsj.aspx

This story's a little weird in the grand scheme of Lovecraft's catalog. This is a fictional memoir of Dr. Samuel Johnson (who famously compiled an extensive dictionary of the English Language); and what's so weird about this story is just how normal it is. Lovecraft was a writer of Weird fiction, a genre that formed in the pulp science-fiction and fantasy magazines of the early 20th century and takes it's names from the magazine Weird Tales. This story isn't weird in the slightest, unless you count the fact that it was supposedly written by a very, very, very old man whose lifespan far exceeds that of a regular human.

The normality of this story stems from the venue in which it was first published. Lovecraft, in addition to being a weird writer, was also an amateur journalist, and this piece was published in a periodical for other amateur journalists. Why amateur journalists wanted to read a fictionalized memoir about Samuel Johnson is beyond me; but everybody has their idiosyncrasies, I guess.