The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928.

It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance.

In 1932, Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Robert E. Howard: "All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."

H.P. Lovecraft Letter to Robert E. Howard (August 16, 1932), in Selected Letters 1932-1934 (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976), p.57.

e U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 for works created prior to January 1, 1978. The problem comes from the fact that before the Copyright Act of 1976 the number of years a work was copyrighted in the U.S. was based on publication rather than life of the author plus a certain number of years and that it was good for only 28 years. After that point, a new copyright had to be filed, and any work that did not have its copyright renewed fell back into the public domain. The Copyright Act of 1976 retroactively extended this renewal period for all works to a period of 47 years - the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20 years to that, for a total of 95 years from publication. If the works were renewed, the copyrights would still be valid in the United States.

The European Union Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection of 1993 extended the copyrights to 70 years after the author's death.

No. 60 Lovecraft wrote,

“ All the issues that were alive in Bible times are dead now--as are the races.

The so-called xxx of today are either Carthaginians or squat Mongoloids from Central Asia,

& the so-called Christians are healthy Aryan pagans who have adopted the external forms of a faith whose original flabbiness would disgust them.

While not strictly a character, Cthulhu does play a key role in the story as the antagonist. Cthulhu is the lord of R'lyeh, and the ancient being that came from the stars hundreds of millions of years ago, to destroy the elder beings on our world. After the task was completed, the god retreated to R'lyeh and became trapped in his sunken tomb.