How Many Stories Did Lovecraft Write?

This Archive holds 50 chronicles, all solely by Lovecraft except one. That number is the Archive's own count and it is deliberately narrow, so a figure quoted elsewhere will usually be higher. The reasons are worth setting out, since they decide which count a reader should use.

What the 50 are

By the year each was written, seven date from the 1910s, 35 from the 1920s and eight from the 1930s. The earliest are Dagon and The Tomb, both of 1917; the latest is The Haunter of the Dark, written in 1935. The three Penguin Classics volumes edited by S. T. Joshi collect 51 pieces, and the Archive holds 50 of them. The one it leaves out is Under the Pyramids, a ghostwriting commission, which falls outside the Archive's scope.

The exception inside the 50 is Through the Gates of the Silver Key, written with E. Hoffmann Price. It is the direct sequel to The Silver Key and completes Randolph Carter's record, and the Archive carries it as the single co-written account on file.

Why other counts are higher

A fuller bibliography adds the commissions Lovecraft revised or wrote outright for other correspondents, among them Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop. It also adds collaborations, juvenile pieces and fragments. This office does not file any of those, and a count that includes them will run well past 50.

The longest

By the usual counts the three longest are The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and At the Mountains of Madness. The rest are short or of middling length, which is why the first-reader order in the Dispatch below can be read at a rate of one evening to a chronicle.