Who Was Randolph Carter?

Randolph Carter is the single most-traveled correspondent this Archive has on file, appearing across five separate chronicles — more than any other recurring figure in the catalog. He first surfaces as the witness of The Statement of Randolph Carter, recounting a companion's disappearance in an underground tomb. He resurfaces in The Silver Key, having lost, in middle age, the capacity to dream his way back to the places of his youth, and in The Unnamable, where — per this Archive's own dossier, which flags the identification as an inference rather than settled fact, since the account never gives its witness a first name — he is very likely the same man.

His fullest documented journey is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in which he crosses the Dreamlands in search of a sunset city he has seen only in dream, assembling allies along the way including the painter-turned-ghoul Richard Pickman and an army of cats. His final chronicle, Through the Gates of the Silver Key — filed jointly with E. Hoffmann Price, one of only two joint chronicles this Archive carries — sends him further still, briefly to the alien world of Yaddith under the guise of a Swami named Chandraputra.