The Silver Key
a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Silver Key" is a fantasy short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in 1926, it is considered part of his Dreamlands series. It was first published in the January 1929 issue of Weird Tales. It is a continuation of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and was followed by a sequel, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", co-written with E. Hoffmann Price. The story and its sequel both feature Lovecraft's recurring character of Randolph Carter as the protagonist.
Plot
Randolph Carter discovers, at the age of 30, that he has gradually "lost the key to the gate of dreams." Randolph once believed life is made up of nothing but pictures in memory, whether they be from real life or dreams. He highly prefers his romantic nightly dreams of fantastic places and beings to the "prosiness of life". He believes his dreams to reveal truths missing from man's waking ideas, regarding the purpose of humans and the universe, primary among these being the truth of beauty as perceived and invented by humans in times past.
As he ages, though, he finds that his daily waking exposure to the more "practical", scientific ideas of man has eroded his ability to dream as he once did and has made him, regretfully, subscribe more and more to the mundane beliefs of everyday, waking "real life". But, still not certain which is truer, he sets out to determine whether the waking ideas of man are superior to his dreams, and in the process, he passes through several unsatisfying philosophical stances.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Silver Key” as a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2341013. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926 and 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Silver Key” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.