After H. P. Lovecraft died, DeLand teenager Robert H. Barlow became his literary executor—and found himself at the center of a publishing power grab. (Photo illustration based on period photos, generated by ChatGPT.)
The DeLand Teenager who Inherited H. P. Lovecraft’s Monsters
Last month, we met Robert H. Barlow, the DeLand teenager who summoned H. P. Lovecraft to Volusia County. Today we’ll share the rest of the story.
When H. P. Lovecraft died in March of 1937, the strange universe he had created was still fragile. His stories lived in pulp magazines, in scattered typescripts, and in letters exchanged with a small but devoted circle of correspondents. Much of the most important material—original manuscripts, revised drafts, and carbons—rested in DeLand, Florida, in the hands of Robert Hayward Barlow.
Lovecraft had named him literary executor, even though Barlow was only nineteen.
Barlow approached the task with the same seriousness he had brought to his small publishing company, Dragon-Fly Press. He began sorting manuscripts, preparing texts, and corresponding about publication plans. He understood how easily pulp paper deteriorated. He had already printed Lovecraft in small editions when few others imagined hardcover collections were possible. Preservation, for him, was not theoretical. It was physical and immediate.
Barlow was not alone in believing Lovecraft’s work deserved permanence. Lovecraft’s literary circle included other devoted allies. Among them were August Derleth of Sauk City, Wisconsin, and Donald Wandrei of nearby Saint Paul, Minnesota. Both had corresponded extensively with Lovecraft. Both believed the work deserved permanence and broader recognition. And both had greater financial resources and stronger connections than Barlow.
In 1939, Derleth and Wandrei founded Arkham House for the express purpose of issuing Lovecraft’s fiction in durable hardcover editions. That same year, they published The Outsider and Others, the first major collection of his stories between boards rather than magazine covers. The book marked a decisive shift. Lovecraft’s reputation began to move from cult admiration toward something more lasting.
As Arkham House grew, Derleth became the primary editor and interpreter of the expanding mythology. He organized recurring elements into a more structured cosmology and promoted Lovecraft as the central architect of what readers would come to call the Cthulhu Mythos. Through Arkham House, Lovecraft entered libraries, collectors’ shelves, and eventually classrooms.
That shift in authority changed Barlow’s position in the story. As Derleth rose, Barlow’s role diminished.
The teenage publisher from DeLand, who had once hosted Lovecraft for weeks and set type beside him by hand, was no longer at the center of the unfolding literary narrative.
Rather than engage in a prolonged struggle over control, Barlow redirected his formidable intellect. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he turned decisively toward anthropology.
What might have seemed like retreat was, in fact, reinvention. Barlow immersed himself in the study of Mesoamerican cultures and languages, mastering Nahuatl and conducting fieldwork in Mexico. His translations and scholarly publications earned respect in academic circles. By the end of the decade, he had established himself as a serious researcher with a promising career.
It was a second act few would have predicted.
By 1950, Robert Hayward Barlow was living in Mexico City, far from the arguments over Lovecraft’s legacy. His days were spent in archives and classrooms. He translated Nahuatl texts line by line, working through colonial-era manuscripts that preserved fragments of Aztec history. He lectured on Mesoamerican culture. He collaborated with Mexican scholars. He walked the streets of a city layered with conquest and memory, studying civilizations that had survived empire and erasure.
The teenage printer had become a meticulous anthropologist, fluent in a language most Americans had never heard spoken.
But his downfall was swift and sudden. A male student at Mexico City College accused Barlow of improper conduct. Within days, school administrators were involved. And in response, on January 2, 1951, Robert H. Barlow took his own life. He was 32.
Barlow’s story ended quietly, washed away by an overdose of barbiturates. It was a tragedy no amount of foreshadowing could have predicted.
Lovecraft’s reputation, meanwhile, continued to ascend. Arkham House editions multiplied. Paperback reprints followed. The mythology expanded across decades, inspiring scholars, filmmakers, artists, and game designers. The writer who once struggled for stable publication became a permanent fixture in American horror.
Barlow didn’t live to witness that transformation, but the path to Lovecraft’s legacy runs through him—and through Volusia County.
Barlow preserved manuscripts at a moment when preservation was uncertain. He believed in hardcover editions before they existed. He treated the work as worthy of careful stewardship when it still appeared on paper meant to crumble.
Before the institutional consolidation, before the myth was codified and systematized, and before Lovecraft became canonical, literary history was made in a modest home near DeLand, at a small press called Dragon-Fly, with a teenager who believed strange stories deserved to be preserved.