H. P. Lovecraft

Author

• Born: August 20, 1890
• Birthplace: Providence, Rhode Island
• Died: March 15, 1937
• Place of death: Providence, Rhode Island

Biography

Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote in a mixed genre of fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction; he came to dominate his pulp periodical market, particularly the magazine Weird Tales, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890, the only child of a relatively affluent family whose ancestry dated to the original founding colonists. This fact, a susceptibility to illness, and the deaths of his father and most of his relatives during his formative years contributed to the precociously brilliant and imaginative Lovecraft’s introspection and nostalgia for the past.

His neurotic mother convinced him that he was ugly; it was possibly this belief but certainly his predilection for solitude which caused him to be reclusive. The few friends he made were firm, and over the course of his life he was to write 100,000 letters of several million words. In the 1970s, these letters, by volume his largest work, were analyzed, as were his deserving essays on nonfiction subjects. Lovecraft’s poetry has been variously described by critics as first-rate, mediocre, and hideous. In the arena of fantasy and borderline science fiction, however, he has received lasting acclaim.

Several influences on his success in these genres are traceable, among them the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, eighteenth-century poetry in general, and Greco-Roman mythology. Four authors definitely influenced Lovecraft: Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he shared the literary technique of pitting his fictive protagonist against an antagonistic horror; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had previously utilized the pervasive legends and lore of New England; Lord Dunsany, who described pantheons of gods alternative to the classical traditions; and Arthur Machen, who had written of entities crisscrossing between the past and present. Nevertheless, it has been consistently asserted that Lovecraft was more than the sum of his parts. Lovecraft drew on these themes and concluded that humanity was of little consequence when compared with the infinite cosmos.

Financially, the family had fallen on hard times after his father’s and other relatives’ deaths, and Lovecraft was never really able to support himself, most of his money coming from his revisions of other authors’ manuscripts. His idiosyncrasies about accepting money for writing and his stubborn refusal to edit or alter his first drafts only ensured a continuing poverty. Fortunately, the fact that he never finished high school or attended college was more than overcome by his passionate love of reading and by his travels in later life.

Lovecraft received two breaks that furthered his career, the first being acceptance into the United Amateur Press Association in 1914. Through successive years, he became intimately involved with the publishing, editorial, and even administrative mechanics of amateur journalism. The second, in 1923, was the advent of the magazine Weird Tales. Through this periodical, Lovecraft published nearly all his major works and acquired twenty thousand “cult” fans. It was in this fantasy genre that he became a legend.

From 1924 to 1926, Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, New York, while married to the domineering Sonia Greene. After the foundering of this incompatible marriage, he returned to his native Providence to enjoy a literary renaissance that would result in progressively better and longer works. On March 15, 1937, he died of intestinal cancer and was buried at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence.

Immediately after his death, his friends and associates August Derleth and Donald Wandrei began collecting and publishing his work in book-length editions through their own publishing vehicle, Arkham House. By the 1950s, Lovecraft had become famous in many European countries and by the 1970s had begun to be seriously studied in the United States. It seems certain Lovecraft’s reputation will not only persevere but also enlarge as his work becomes a scholarly subject.

Author Works

Short Fiction

The Dunwich Horror, and Others, 1963

Dagon, and Other Macabre Tales, 1965

The Horror in the Museum, and Other Revisions, 1970

Long Fiction

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1943

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, 1943

At the Mountains of Madness, and Other Novels, 1964

Poetry

Collected Poems, 1963

A Winter Wish, 1977

Nonfiction

Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1945

Selected Letters, 1965-1976 (August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, editors)

Lovecraft at Last, 1975 (with Willis Conover)

Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, 2000 (S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, editors)

Miscellaneous

The Outsider, and Others, 1939

Beyond the Wall of Sleep, 1943

Marginalia, 1944

The Something About Cats, 1949

The Shuttered Room, and Other Pieces, 1959

The Dark Brotherhood, and Other Pieces, 1966

To Quebec and the Stars, 1976

Bibliography

Airaksinen, Timo. The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. A good study of Lovecraft’s themes and execution. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Burleson, Donald R. H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. A very helpful consideration of Lovecraft’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Provides a good overview of his work as well as placing him among other writers in the genre.

Burleson, Donald R. “Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space.’” The Explicator 52 (Fall, 1993): 48–50. A discussion of the story “The Colour Out of Space,” focusing on the craft and intricacy of this masterful piece.

Cannon, Peter, ed. Lovecraft Remembered. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1998. A look at Lovecraft’s life and works.

Carter, Lin. Lovecraft: A Look Behind the “Cthulhu Mythos.” New York: Ballantine, 1972. An extended examination of Lovecraft’s mythic horror pantheon. Useful for following the development of his fictive world of demons and altered “realities.”

Clements, Nicholaus. “Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark.’” The Explicator 57 (Winter, 1999): 98–100. Argues that the lightning in the story is not ordinary light, but upward lightning, a dark light not ordinarily found in our universe but that comes from other dimensions of space.

Joshi, S. T. “Cthulhu’s Empire: H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on His Contemporaries and Successors.” Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 2013, pp. 19–35. Discusses Lovecraft’s lasting influence on the horror and science fiction genres.

Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1996. A good biography of Lovecraft by a scholar.

Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981. A thorough presentation of Lovecraft scholarship. Including both primary and secondary works.

Joshi, S. T., editor. H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. Contains essays by Barton Levi St. Armand, J. Vernon Shea, and Dirk W. Mosig, as well as a survey of Lovecraft criticism by Joshi.

Joshi, S. T., and L. D. Blackmore. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography: Supplement. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1985. Supplement to the 1981 Joshi bibliography, covering materials published between 1981 and 1985.

Lévy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, translated by S. T. Joshi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. A useful consideration of Lovecraft’s fiction as examples of the fantastic in literature. Helpful to those interested in genre study and critical theory.

Lovecraft, H. P. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. A skillful arrangement of some of Lovecraft’s letters, illuminating the life of the author from youth to death.

Nelson, Victoria. “H. P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies.” Raritan 15 (Winter, 1996): 92-121. Compares the imaginative universe of Lovecraft to that of Daniel Paul Schreber; claims that, obsessed by themes whose full dimension he was unable or unwilling to grasp consciously, Lovecraft used his intense sensitivity to his own unconscious to give modern readers a unique body of work and a new variation on some very old religious and philosophical traditions of Western culture.

Oakes, David. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. A study of the role of science in the dark fantasy novels of Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King.

Schultz, David E., and S. T. Joshi. An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft. London: Associated University Presses, 1991. Includes essays on Lovecraft’s themes, the uses of isolation in his works of fiction, his cosmic vision, his unique mythology, his modernism, his use of the pulp magazine tradition, and his relationship to Jorge Luis Borges.