Inspiration
Like Lovecraft's novel fragment "Azathoth" (1922, published 1938), The Dream-Quest appears to have been influenced by Vathek, a 1786 novel by William Thomas Beckford that "is similarly an exotic fantasy written without chapter divisions". Critics like Will Murray and David E. Schultz, in fact, have suggested that The Dream-Quest is in effect a second attempt at completing the abandoned novel Azathoth.
While the influence of the fantasies of Lord Dunsany on Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is often noted, Robert M. Price argues that a more direct model for The Dream-Quest is provided by the six Mars ("Barsoom") novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs that had been published by 1927:
In Lovecraft's novella, the traditional Dunsanianism of his Dreamlands fantasies serves only as background, mere landscape. The action and the plot are essentially Burroughs. In this book, what is Randolph Carter but an otherworldly interloper who arrives on the scene in an extramundane world not as a cowed outsider, but rather as a bold adventurer who loses no time in establishing himself at the head of a force of strange alien races whom he enlists in a crusade against evil forces threatening his own happiness.
Price suggests that "Lovecraft's fighting ghouls correspond quite nicely to the Tharks of Barsoom, the canine Richard Pickman to Tars Tarkas". In his view, the "villainous race of pirates who fly between the Dream-earth and the moon in aerial ships...are Lovecraft's analogues to Burroughs' race of airborne pirates, the First Born or Black Martians."
Elsewhere, Price maintains that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was also a significant influence on The Dream-Quest, pointing out parallels between the two works:
Carter tries to reach his thrice-glimpsed Sunset City, just as Dorothy tries to reach the Emerald City. Both make the acquaintance of various tribes of wondrous creatures along the way. The zoogs might even be viewed as Lovecraft's Munchkins. And in both cases there is a final scene of revelation in which the protagonist is informed that the ethereal object of his/her quest is in reality just the dream-version of the familiar and beloved homestead back in the waking world, to which the hero/ine at once returns. Glinda or Nyarlathotep, what's the difference?
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia cites Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun and "The Great Stone Face" as influences.
Read more about this topic: The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath
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