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The Temple

Introduction

Below is the timeline containing the publication information of both H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple”. It contains a time line entry for each known instance of publication for every known appearance of the short story, up until 2017. There are a few instances where the information available pointed to other, unrecorded, or undated instances of publication; in such cases the entries will appear as a date range rather than a single instance of publication, and there will be a mention of these undated publications in their respective entry.

Analysis

After “The Temple’s” initial publication in the September, 1925 issue of Weird Tales, it only appeared three times over the next 40 years until it’s inclusion in 1965’s Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, an Arkham House publication. That Arkham House, a small boutique publisher founded in 1939 specifically to release the works of H.P. Lovecraft, would not republish “The Temple” for 26 years after it founding, suggests the story’s lack of important and prominence within Lovecraft’s body of work. The timeline corroborates this idea, for while it does appear in 27 collections, at no point is it the title story. Further evidence of its lesser status can be found in its inclusion in only five anthologies not focused on Lovecraft, something which also serves to indicate a lack of interest in the work in the wider horror landscape.