"... man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it."
-H.P. Lovecraft, in "The Shadow Out of Time"
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937)
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a writer of weird fiction who died in 1937.
Although he is best known as a horror writer, some believe his voluminous
correspondence to be his greatest accomplishment. You can explore his
many facets through the pages outlined below.
This brief biography first appeared in the H.P. Lovecraft
Centennial Guidebook
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 a.m. on
August 20, 1890, at his family home at 454 (then numbered 194) Angell
Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips
Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry to the arrival of George Phillips
to Massachusetts in 1630. His father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a
traveling salesman for Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence. When
Lovecraft was three his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel
room in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained
for five years before dying on July 19, 1898. Lovecraft was apparently
informed that his father was paralyzed and comatose during this period,
but the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case; it is
nearly certain that Lovecraft's father died of paresis, a form of
neurosyphilis.
With the death of Lovecraft's father, the upbringing of the boy fell tohis mother, his two aunts, and especially his grandfather, the prominent
industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Lovecraft was a precocious
youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and
writing at age six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for the
Arabian Nights, which he read by the age of five; it was at this
time that he adapted the pseudonym of "Abdul Alhazred," who later became
the author of the mythical Necronomicon. The next year, however,
his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek mythology,
gleaned through Bulfinch's Age of Fable and through children's
versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Indeed his earliest
surviving literary work, "The Poem of Ulysses" (1897), is a paraphrase of
the Odyssey in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. But Lovecraft
had by this time already discovered weird fiction, and his first story,
the non-extant "The Noble Eavesdropper," may date to as early as 1896.
His interest in the weird was fostered by his grandfather, who entertained
Lovecraft with off-the-cuff weird tales in the Gothic mode.
As a boy Lovecraft was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent
illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. His attendance at the
Slater Avenue School was sporadic, but Lovecraft was soaking up much
information through independent reading. At about the age of eight he
discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. He began to produce
hectographed journals, The Scientific Gazette (1899-1907) and
The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903-07), for distribution
amongst his friends. When he entered Hope Street High School, he found
both his teachers and peers congenial and encouraging, and he developed a
number of long-lasting friendships with boys of his age. Lovecraft's
first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an
astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly
thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet
Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The
Providence Tribune (1906-08) and The Providence Evening News
(1914-18), as well as The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News (1915).
In 1904 the death of Lovecraft's grandfather, and the subsequent
mismanagement of his property and affairs, plunged Lovecraft's family into
severe financial difficulties. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to
move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters at 598
Angell Street. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace,
and apparently contemplated suicide, as he took long bicycle rides and
looked wistfully at the watery depths of the Barrington River. But the
thrill of learning banished those thoughts. In 1908, however, just prior
to his graduation from high school, he suffered a nervous breakdown that
compelled him to leave school without a diploma; this fact, and his
consequent failure to enter Brown University, were sources of great shame
to Lovecraft in later years, in spite of the fact that he was one of the
most formidable autodidacts of his time. From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was
a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests
and his poetry writing. During this whole period Lovecraft was thrown
into an unheathily close relationship with his mother, who was still
suffering from the trauma of her husband's illness and death, and who
developed a pathological love-hate relationship with her son.
Lovecraft emerged from his hermitry in a very peculiar way. Having
taken to reading the early "pulp" magazines of the day, he became so
incensed at the insipid love stories of one Fred Jackson in The
Argosy that he wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson. This
letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson's
defenders. Lovecraft engaged in a heated debate in the letter column of
The Argosy and its associated magazines, Lovecraft's responses
being almost always in rollicking heroic couplets reminiscent of Dryden
and Pope. This controversy was noted by Edward F. Daas, President of the
United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from
around the country who wrote and published their own magazines. Daas
invited Lovecraft to join the UAPA, and Lovecraft did so in early 1914.
Lovecraft published thirteen issues of his own paper, The
Conservative (1915-23), as well as contributing poetry and essays
voluminously to other journals. Later Lovecraft became President and
Official Editor of the UAPA, and also served briefly as President of the
rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). This entire experience
may well have saved Lovecraft from a life of unproductive reclusiveness;
as he himself once said: "In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was
first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any
animal well can be...With the advent of the United I obtained a renewal to
live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and
found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly
futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after
art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening
world."
It was in the amateur world that Lovecraft recommenced the writing of fiction, which he had abandoned in 1908. W. Paul Cook and others, noting the promise shown in such early tales as "The Beast in the Cave" (1905) and "The Alchemist" (1908), urged Lovecraft to pick up his fictional pen again. This Lovecraft did, writing "The Tomb" and "Dagon" in quick succession in the summer of 1917. Thereafter Lovecraft kept up a steady if sparse flow of fiction, although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still his dominant mode of literary expression. Lovecraft also became involved in an ever-increasing network of correspondence with friends and associates, and he eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century.
Lovecraft's mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating,
suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital,
whence, like her husband, she would never emerge. Her death on May 24,
1921, however was the result of a bungled gall bladder operation.
Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of his mother....
But in a few weeks had
recovered enough to attend an amateur journalism convention in Boston on
July 4, 1921. It was on this occasion that he first met the woman who
would become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian Jew seven years
Lovecraft's senior, but the two seemed, at least initially, to find
themselves very congenial. Lovecraft visited Sonia in her Brooklyn
apartment in 1922, and the news of their marriage on March 3, 1924, was
not entirely a surprise to their friends; but it may have been to
Lovecraft's two aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, who
were notified only by letter after the ceremony had taken place.
Lovecraft moved into Sonia's apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects
for the couple seemed good: Lovecraft had gained a foothold as a
professional writer by the acceptance of several of his early stories by
Weird Tales, the celebrated pulp magazine founded in 1923; Sonia
had a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue in New York.
But troubles descended upon the couple almost immediately: the hat shop went bankrupt, Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to Weird Tales (which would have necessitated his move to Chicago), and Sonia's health gave way, forcing her to spend time in a New Jersey sanitarium. Lovecraft attempted to secure work, but few were willing to hire a thirty-four-year-old-man with no job experience. On January 1, 1925, Sonia went to Cleveland to take up a job there, and Lovecraft moved into a single apartment near the seedy Brooklyn area called Red Hook.
Although Lovecraft had many friends in New York--Frank Belknap Long,
Rheinhart Kleiner, Samuel Loveman--he became increasingly depressed by his
isolation and the masses of "foreigners" in the city. His fiction turned
from the nostalgic ("The Shunned House" (1924) is set in Providence) to
the bleak and misanthropic ("The Horror at Red Hook" and "He" (both 1924)
lay bare his feelings for New York). Finally, in early 1926, plans were
made for Lovecraft to return to the Providence he missed so keenly. But
where did Sonia fit into these plans? No one seemed to know, least of all
Lovecraft. Although he continued to profess his affection for her, he
acquiesced when his aunts barred her from coming to Providence to start a
business; their nephew could not be tainted by the stigma of a tradeswoman
wife. The marriage was essentially over, and a divorce in 1929 was
inevitable.
When Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, settling at 10 Barnes Street north of Brown University, it was not to bury himself away as he had done in the 1908-13 period; rather, the last ten years of his life were the time of his greatest flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. His life was relatively uneventful--he traveled widely to various antiquarian sites around the eastern seaboard (Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine); he wrote his greatest fiction, from "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) to At the Mountains of Madness (1931) to "The Shadow out of Time" (1934-35); and he continued his prodigiously vast correspondence--but Lovecraft had found his niche as a New England writer of weird fiction and as a general man of letters. He nurtured the careers of many young writers (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became concerned with political and economic issues, as the Great Depression led him to support Roosevelt and become a moderate socialist; and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture.
The last two or three years of his life, however, were filled with
hardship. In 1932 his beloved aunt, Mrs. Clark, died, and he moved into
quarters at 66 College Street, right behind the John Hay Library, with his
other aunt Mrs. Gamwell in 1933. (This house has now been moved to 65
Prospect Street.) His later stories, increasingly lengthy and complex,
became difficult to sell, and he was forced to support himself largely
through the "revision" or ghost-writing of stories, poetry, and
nonfictions works. In 1936 the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of his
closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time the
illness that would cause his own death--cancer of the intestine--had
already progressed so far that little could be done to treate it.
Lovecraft attempted to carry on in increasing pain through the winter of 1936-37, but was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital
on March 10, 1937, where he died five days later. He was buried on March
18 at the Phillips family plot at Swan Point Cemetery.
It is likely that, as he saw death approaching, Lovecraft envisioned
the ultimate oblivion of his work: he had never had a true book published
in his lifetime (aside, perhaps, from the crudely issued The Shadow
over Innsmouth [1936]), and his stories, essays, and poems were
scattered in a bewildering number of amateur or pulp magazines. But the
friendships that he had forged merely by correspondence held him in good
stead: August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were determined to preserve
Lovecraft's stories in the dignity of a hardcover book, and formed the
publishing firm of Arkham House initially to publish Lovecraft's work;
they issued The Outsider and Others in 1939. Many other volumes
followed from Arkham House, and eventually Lovecraft's work became
available in paperback and was translated into a dozen languages. Today,
at the centennial of his birth, his stories are available in textually
corrected editions, his essays, poems, and letters are widely available,
and many scholars have probed the depths and complexities of his work and
thought. Much remains to be done in the study of Lovecraft, but it is
safe to say that, thanks to the intrinsic merit of his own work and to the
diligence of his associates and supporters, Lovecraft has gained a small
but unassailable niche in the canon of American and world literature.Howard Phillips Lovecraft
ArKa/D/ia! presents H.P. Lovecraft
The Cthulhu Mythos: A Guide
