Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (born c. 1871) is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft, and the protagonist of his horror sci-fi novella The Shadow Out of Time. He is a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, and, from 1908 until 1913, a victim of the Great Race of Yith.
==Biography==
Peaslee was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about 1871, the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee. He enrolled in Miskatonic University in 1889, at the age of 18, and after graduation studied economics at Harvard. In 1895, he became an instructor in political economy at Miskatonic, promoted to associate professor in 1898 and becoming a full professor in 1902.
He married Alice Keezar, also of Haverhill, in 1896; their children are Robert K. (b. 1898), Wingate (b. 1900) and Hannah (b. 1903). They lived at 27 Crane Street in Arkham.
==Possession==
Peaslee fears he is losing his mind when he unaccountably sees strange vistas of other worlds and of the Yithian library city. He also feels himself being led about by these creatures and experiences how they live. When he is returned to his own body, he finds that those around him have judged him insane due to the actions of the Yithian that possessed his body for the past five years. While he was experiencing a Yithian existence in Earth's ancient past, the Yithian occupying his body was experiencing a human one in the present day.
His son is Wingate Peaslee, also a Miskatonic University professor, and the only family member who doesn't cut ties with Nathaniel. Instead, Wingate uses his knowledge of psychology to try to help his father.
==Behind the Mythos==
There are autobiographical aspects to the character. The years of Peaslee's amnesia correspond to the timespan of Lovecraft's adolescent nervous breakdown, which forced him to drop out of high school and withdraw from society. During this period, Lovecraft suffered from facial tics, which may be reflected in the Yithian-possessed Peaslee's inability to control his facial muscles. The feeling Lovecraft described, upon returning to Providence after living in New York City for two years, that he was "awakening from the queer dream about being away from home" has been called "the cornerstone upon which Lovecraft built his masterpiece, 'The Shadow out of Time'." But An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, which calls Peaslee perhaps "the most thoroughly developed of HPL's characters", notes that there are parallels as well to Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, who also displayed eccentric behavior during a five-year period of madness.
Category:Humans
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works