"The Terrible
Old Man" is a very small story by H. P. Lovecraft, written on January 28,
1920, and first published in the Tryout, an inexpert press publication, in July
1921. It's prominent as the first story to make use of Lovecraft's unreal New
England setting, bringing in the imaginary town of Kingsport.
Lovecraft scholar
Peter Cannon superficially explains the story as "little more than a polemic
against the imposition of people Lovecraft regarded as 'foreigners,' that is,
the non-English migrant who arrived in the nineteenth century as cheap labor to
fill up the factories of a progressively industrialized America."
