The man shows the narrator visions of the city's past and future so terrifying that he begins to scream wildly.

The opening paragraphs of "He" are believed to be largely autobiographical,[4] expressing Lovecraft's own feelings about the city: My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

[5]Lovecraft's disgust for New York stemmed in large part from his racist attitudes, which are also reflected in "He"'s narrator: [T]he throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

The stranger's house is apparently based on a mansion on the block bounded by Perry, Bleecker, Charles and West 4th streets, built as early as 1744 and demolished in 1865.

[3] A suggested literary model for "He" is Lord Dunsany's The Chronicles of Rodriguez, in which a wizard displays visions of past and future wars in successive windows.