H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction who is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and widely-read authors of popular fiction of all time. Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, since his death he has gained a massive and devoted following of readers who have been captivated by his gripping tales of the supernatural. Amongst scholars, Lovecraft is considered to be an examplar of a uniquely American strain of gothic fiction tracing its roots back to Edgar Allen Poe. Deeply influenced by Poe, as well as by Hawthorne, Lovecraft, like his forebears, created an entirely alternate world of sheer imagination that remains one of the most engaging magnum opuses of fiction ever created.

Biography

Early life

Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, a woman who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. His parents married, the first marriage for both, when they were in their thirties. This was unusually late in life given the time period. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a Chicago hotel room while on a business trip. He was brought back to Providence and placed in Butler Hospital where he remained until his death in 1898.

Lovecraft thereafter was raised by his mother, his two aunts, and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. All resided together in the family home. Lovecraft was a child prodigy, reciting poetry at age two and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred young Howard's interest in what Lovecraft later referred to as "the weird" by telling him his own original tales of Gothic horror.

Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child, both physically and psychologically. Due to his sickly condition and his undisciplined, argumentative nature he barely attended school until he was eight and then was withdrawn after a year. He read voraciously during this period and became especially enamored with chemistry and astronomy. Four years later he returned to public school at Hope Street High School.

In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown and consequently never received his high school diploma. This failure to complete his education (he wished to study at Brown University), was a source of disappointment and shame even late into his life.

Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but from 1908 until 1913 his output was primarily poetry he wrote while living a hermit's existence and having almost no contact with anybody but his mother. This changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories of one of the publications popular writers. The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the American Press Association, who invited Lovecraft to join in 1914. The job reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays. In 1917, at the prodding of correspondents, he returned to fiction with more polished stories such as "The Tomb" and "Dagon".

Marriage and New York

A few weeks after the death of his mother in 1921 Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924, and the couple moved to New York City. Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself and came to intensely dislike New York life.

A few years later he and Greene, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed. He returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.

Return to Providence

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" until 1933. The period after his return to Providence—the last decade of his life—was Lovecraft's most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications]] of the day as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing, including "The Mound", "Winged Death", and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer".

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937 in Providence.

Works

H. P. Lovecraft’s name is virtually synonymous with American style horror fiction; his writing, particularly his so-called “Cthulhu Mythos”, has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements can be seen in novels, movies, comic books, and even cartoons which take science-fiction and horror as their subjects. Many modern horror writers — such as Stephen King, Bentley Little, and Joe R. Lansdale, to name just a few — have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences.

Publication History

For most of the 20th century, the definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction were published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a considerable amount of other literature as well. Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft's works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories,, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. They collect the standard texts as edited by S. T. Joshi, most of which were available in the Arkham House editions, with the exception of the restored text of "The Shadow Out of Time" from The Dreams in the Witch House, which had been previously released by small-press publisher Hippocampus Press. In 2005 the prestigious Library of America canonized Lovecraft with a volume of his stories edited by Peter Straub, and Random House's Modern Library line just released the "definitive edition" of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Lovecraft's poetry is collected in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft, while much of his juvenilia, various essays on philosophical, political and literary topics, antiquarian travelogues, and other things, can be found in Miscellaneous Writings. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", first published in 1927, is a historical survey of horror literature available with endnotes as The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Letters

Although Lovecraft is known mostly for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history. S. T. Joshi estimates that Lovecraft wrote about 87,500 letters from 1912 until his death in 1937, including one 70-page letter from November 9, 1929, to Woodburn Harris.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• The Gentleman From Angell Street: Memories of H.P. Lovecraft ( ISBN 0-9701699-1-4), written by Muriel and C.M. Eddy.

• Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos]] (ISBN 0-586-04166-4), written by Lin Carter.

• Lovecraft: a Biography (ISBN 0-345-25115-6), written by L. Sprague de Camp.

• H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (ISBN 0-940884-88-7) written by S. T. Joshi.

External links

• The H. P. Lovecraft Archive
• Works at Project Gutenberg Australia
• The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival
• The H.P. Lovecraft Collection on DVD Films and scholarly commentary by S.T. Joshi etc.
• Essay on Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi
• Mythos Tomes - A website about H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos
• Master of Disgust - Salon.com
• Extract from Michel Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
• Existential Sadness in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”
• The HP Lovecraft Historical Society
• A Pictorial Bibliography
• H. P. Lovecraft at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Shadow Over Usenet Archives

Credits

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