Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft wrote in radically different forms, from the seemingly shallow Burroughs to the so deep as to be obtuse Lovecraft, with London somewhere on a savagely darkening middle ground. What they all three wrote about was suspicion of, discontent with and escape from the constricting cycle of Modernity. In the case of London and E.R.B. they hit a wildly popular mass nerve and became publishing sensations. However, a reading of their work today will expose them as such raw opponents to the direction in which they saw the modern world going—and indeed where it has gone—that it almost impossible to imagine them making it into print today with our current literary filters. To the extent they are still in print in a much reduced volume one may credit current publishing with a grandfather clause.

Jeffers and Howard, who began writing later than the three writers just discussed, exhibit an outright hostility towards the modern world, and go even deeper into criticisms of civilization, with Jeffers going farthest into a rejection of humanity as inherently corrupt.

With Howard one sees a writer who counted London, E.R.B. and Lovecraft as influences, not content with escapism but outright rejection, eventually killing himself at a very young age after a furious writing career. One might say that Howard, of the five, burned the brightest and the shortest, and did so in a luridly dark corner of the collective mind. He also delved into poetry proper.

Jeffers rejected Man’s feeble attempt from the beginning with The Stone Cutters in 1924, continuing his work with an incisive rejection of earlier American imperialism and the nation’s pending militarism, and amped up his criticism to a visceral level with The Inquisitors in 1948, effectively closing the period under discussion, which is roughly the Age of European Suicide from 1901-45.*

*By 1901the Western World was clearly marching toward civil war. This author counts such colonial activities as the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War, and the Philippine Insurrection, along with the world wide naval arms race already under way at the turn of the century, to be nothing more than the immediate logistical build up and prepositioning of forces necessary to light the fools fire that was The Great War in 1914.