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," biographer
S. T. Joshi wrote.
[6] 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.
[7]
By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the last
unexplored regions of the Earth, where 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."
[8]
The first expedition of
Richard E. Byrd took place in 1928-1930, the period just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters, remarking at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past".
[9] In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.
[10]
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 where 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."
[11] S.T. Joshi has called this theory "facile."
[12]
Joshi further cites as Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for
At the Mountains of Madness 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 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.
[13]
Another proposed inspiration for
At the Mountains of Madness is
Edgar Rice Burroughs'
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," writes critic William Fulwiler. "Both 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.
[14]
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 dinosaurshatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 editionWeird Tales.[15] 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 come up with 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."
[16]
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggest 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.
[17]
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 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.
[18] Lovecraft had also used this 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.