Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in
Antarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," the biographer
S. T. Joshi wrote. At about the age of 9, inspired by
W. Clark Russell's 1887 book
The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica. By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the last
unexplored regions of the Earth in which large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in... with little fear of immediate contradiction." However, Lovecraft was basically accurate in presenting the geographic knowledge of Antarctica as it was known at the time, and he referred to
continental drift, a theory which was then not widely accepted. The first expedition of
Richard E. Byrd took place between 1928 and 1930, just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters and remarked at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past." In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd. In
Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos Lin Carter suggests that one inspiration for
At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident in which the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of
Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest." Joshi further cites Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for
At the Mountains of Madness as
Edgar Allan Poe's only novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text and explicitly borrows the mysterious cry
Tekeli-li or
Takkeli from Poe's work. In a letter to
August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in
Pym. Another proposed inspiration for
At the Mountains of Madness is
Edgar Rice Burroughs's ''
At the Earth's Core'' (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a
hollow Earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," wrote the critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques. In both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's Shoggoth. Other possible sources include
A. Merritt's "
The People of the Pit," whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After," a story about
dinosaurs hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition of
Weird Tales. In a letter to
Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten," "cheap," and "puerile" version of an idea he had years earlier, and his dissatisfaction may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of Earth's history." Edward Guimont has argued that
At the Mountains of Madness was inspired by contemporary discourse around
life on Mars, including
Mars-set fictional works and the claims of
Martian canals made by
Percival Lowell (whom Lovecraft met in 1907). Guimont has also proposed other influences, including contemporary theories about the decline of the
Norse Greenlanders and claims of survival of
woolly mammoths in Alaska and particularly plot details being inspired by the 1930 discovery of the remains of
Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition.
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that the long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by
Oswald Spengler's
The Decline of the West. Some details of the story may also have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901
Arctic exploration novel
The Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930. The title is derived from a line in
Lord Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...". Lovecraft's own "
The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city that is apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, sets a precedent for
At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species. Lovecraft had also used that device in "
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927) As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich and the illustrations of
Gustave Doré, both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times. ==Publication==