H.p. Lovecraft
In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he himself claimed to have suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate). 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.
During that time, he lived a hermit's existence, having almost no contact with anyone 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 publication's popular writers.
The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join them in 1914.
The UAPA 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".
Around that time, he began to build up a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century.
Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch (Psycho), Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series).
In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother had another baby and was committed to Butler Hospital just like her husband before her.
Lovecraft was devastated by the loss.
Marriage and New York
Lovecraft and Sonia Greene
A few weeks after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft.
Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely dislike New York life. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he sublimated in the short story "The Horror at Red Hook."
A few years later, Lovecraft and his wife, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed. The period after his return to Providence—the last decade of his life—was Lovecraft's most prolific.
During that time period, he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales), as well as longer efforts, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937 in Providence.
Grave of H.
Joshi places Spengler at the center of his discussion of Lovecraft's political and philosophical ideas. Lovecraft wrote to Clark Ashton Smith in 1927: "It is my belief, and was so long before Spengler put his seal of scholarly proof on it, that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank decadence" (see China Miéville's introduction to "At the Mountains of Madness", Modern Library Classics, 2005). Lovecraft was also acquainted with the writings of another German intellectual who dealt with civilized decadence in philosophical terms, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Lovecraft frequently dealt with the idea of civilization struggling against more barbaric, primitive elements.
In some stories this struggle is at an individual level; many of his protagonists are cultured, highly-educated men who are gradually corrupted by some obscure and feared influence.
In such stories, the "curse" is often a hereditary one, either because of interbreeding with non-humans (e.g., "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920), "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)) or through direct magical influence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Physical and mental degradation often come together; this theme of 'tainted blood' may represent concerns relating to Lovecraft's own family history, particularly the death of his father due to what Lovecraft must have suspected to be a syphilitic disorder.
In other tales, an entire society is threatened by barbarism.
But most often, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a malevolent underclass influenced by inhuman forces.
There is a lack of analysis as to whether England's gradual loss of prominence and related conflicts (Boer War, India, World War I) had an impact on Lovecraft's worldview. It is likely that the "roaring twenties" left Lovecraft disillusioned as he was still obscure and struggling with the basic necessities of daily life, combined with seeing non-European immigrants in New York City.
Race, ethnicity, and class
Lovecraft lived at a time when the eugenics movement, anti-Catholicism, nativism, and strict racial segregation and miscegenation laws were all widespread in the United States and the Protestant countries of Europe, and his writings reflect that social and intellectual environment.
Non-Anglo-Saxon whites of European descent are frequently disparaged in his work on ethnic grounds. The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South", are common targets.
Joshi notes "There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as 'typical of his time', for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. He says Lovecraft was horrified by reports of anti-Jewish violence in Germany during the 1930s, which he regarded as irrational.
Sprague de Camp also says that Lovecraft enjoyed getting a rise out of people he considered his intellectual inferiors by stating in a deadpan manner whatever he thought would offend them the most, and suggests that at least some reports of Lovecraft's racism derived from this practice.
Examples
In his personal letters, Lovecraft was explicit and candid in expressing his racism. For example, of the Jews he wrote,
And in the same letter (No.
He seemed almost to lose his mind."
Risks of a scientific era
At the turn of the 20th century, man's increased reliance upon science was both opening new worlds and solidifying the manners by which he could understand them. Merritt (The Moon Pool, later a great liking and admiration of the original version of The Metal Monster) and Lovecraft's friends Robert E.
He also declares Blackwood's "The Willows" to be the single best piece of weird fiction ever written.
Among the books found in his library (as evidenced in Lovecraft's Library by S.T. Many later figures were influenced by Lovecraft's works, including author and artist Clive Barker, prolific horror writer Stephen King, comics writers Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, film directors John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and Guillermo Del Toro, horror manga artist Junji Ito, and artist H.
the use of Arkham Insane Asylum in The Batman comic book series), music, games, and even cartoons.
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote his short story "There Are More Things" in memory of Lovecraft. Lovecraft (later shortened to just Lovecraft) who released four albums in the 1960s and 1970s, and the thrash metal band Metallica, devoted readers of Lovecraft's work, who recorded a song inspired by The Call of Cthulhu, titled The Call of Ktulu, a song based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, titled The Thing That Should Not Be and a song based on H.P.'s Hounds of Tindalos titled All Nightmare Long off of Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic.
Survey of the work
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. 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.
He sometimes dated his letters 200 years before the current date, which would have put the writing back in U.S.
One result of these conflicts was the legal confusion over who owned what copyrights.
All works published before 1923 are public domain in the U.S. However, there is some disagreement over who exactly owns or owned the copyrights and whether the copyrights for the majority of Lovecraft's works published post-1923—including such prominent pieces as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness"—have expired as of April 2008.
Questions center over whether copyrights for Lovecraft's works were ever renewed under the terms of the U.S. later agreed to remove this section at Chaosium's request.
Regardless of the legal disagreements surrounding Lovecraft's works, Lovecraft himself was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos.
(See Lovecraft Country.)
Historical locations
Binger in Caddo County, Oklahoma (The Mound)
Copp's Hill, Boston, Massachusetts
Red Line (MBTA)
Pawtuxet (now Cranston, Rhode Island)
Newburyport, Massachusetts
Ipswich, Massachusetts
Bolton, Massachusetts
Salem, Massachusetts
Many locations within his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, including the (then purportedly haunted) Halsey House, Prospect Terrace, and Brown University's John Hay Library and John Carter Brown Library.
Danvers State Hospital, in Danvers, Massachusetts, which is largely believed to have served as inspiration for the infamous Arkham sanatorium from "The Thing on the Doorstep".
Catskill Mountains, New York
Fictional locations
Miskatonic University in the fictional Arkham, Massachusetts
Dunwich, Massachusetts
Innsmouth, Massachusetts
Kingsport, Massachusetts
Aylesbury, Massachusetts
Martin's Beach
The Miskatonic river
The fictional Central University Library at the real University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. University Press of Kentucky, November 1990.
The Gentleman From Angell Street: Memories of H.
Eddy was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales.
Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (ISBN 0-586-04166-4), written by Lin Carter in 1972, is a survey of Lovecraft's work (along with that of other members of the Lovecraft Circle) with considerable information on his life.
The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos by S.T. Lovecraft: A Life (ISBN 0-940884-88-7) written by Lovecraft scholar S.
The three collections published by Penguin, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, incorporate the modifications made in the corrected texts as well as the annotations provided by Joshi.
Lovecraft's ghost-written works are compiled in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, edited again by Joshi.
Some of Lovecraft's writings, however, are annotated with footnotes or endnotes.