"The Terrible Old Man" is a very short story by H.
P. Lovecraft, written on January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout,
an amateur press publication, in July 1921. It's notable as the first story to
make use of Lovecraft's imaginary New England setting, introducing the
fictional town of Kingsport. Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon dismissively
describes the story as "little more than a polemic against the intrusion
of people Lovecraft regarded as 'foreigners,' that is, the non-English
immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century as cheap labor to fill the
factories of an increasingly industrialized America."
