Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 in his native home at 454 (then 194) Angel Street in Providence, Rhode Island. He came from distinguished ancestry: his maternal line, the Phillips's, could trace its lineage almost to the Mayflower, and when Lovecraft later visited some erstwhile ancestral estates in western Rhode Island the name of Phillips was remembered with fondness and respect  his paternal line was of English origin, and Lovecraft could trace the Lovecraft or Lovecraft name well into the fifteenth century. At the time of his birth Lovecraft family was quite welted, most of the wealth derived from the extensive business interests of Lovecraft maternal grandfather, Whittle Van Burin Phillips. This prosperity, however, was not to last. The death of Whittle Phillips in 1904 had two calamitous effects: it robbed Lovecraft of one of his major early influences (for with the death of Lovecraft father in 1898 of paresis the raising of the lad had been entrusted to his mother, his two aunts, and especially his grandfather); moreover, because of the mismanagement of affairs by Phillips's business associates, Phillips's fortune was squandered and the Lovecraft were forced to move out of their palatial mansion. Lovecraft never recovered from the loss of his birthplace: in the short run it drove him almost to suicide, as he took long bicycle rides and gazed wistfully at the watery depths of the Barring ton River; in the long run it led to a sense of loss and displacement that his early readings only augmented.

 The prodigious fecundity of Lovecraft early writing indicates not only precocity but considerable leisure; indeed, Lovecraft formal schooling – first at Slater Avenue School, then at Hope Street High School – was always sporadic, and did not in the end lead to a diploma. Poor health was the cause of his frequent absences, but the nature of his malady is not now easy to discern. Lovecraft claimed to have suffered frequent nervous breakdowns in youth, including a serious one in 1908 which led to his withdrawal not only from high school but also from the world at large. He destroyed much of his early writing, and for the next five years retreated into a hermitry from which little could stir him: we know that on his twenty-first birthday in 1911 he rode the trolleys all day, but aside from this the period is largely blank.
 
 Even the professional sale of his work was generated through the amateur world. First, some of his poems were reprinted from amateur journals by the professional National Magazine of Boston; then, in 1921, Lovecraft received an offer to write a series of six "Grewsome Tales" for a professional magazine, Home Brew, launched by an amateur colleague, George Julius Houtain. Lovecraft was to have been paid $5 for each segment of the serial – which we now know as "Herbert West – Reanimator," universally acknowledged as Lovecraft poorest work – but whether he ever was is open to question. The next year he wrote another serial for Home Brew (which was actually largely a humor magazine, and which Lovecraft aptly termed a "vile rag" [SL 4.170]), the much better tale "The Lurking Fear." In 1923 the founding of Weird Tales seemed to promise a ready market for his work, but Lovecraft was initially reluctant to submit his stories there; then when he did so (remarking in his cover letter that some of the tales had been rejected by Black Mask) and when the tales were accepted, he felt it too bothersome to retype the stories in double-spacing. But he finally made the effort, and from then on his work began to appear there regularly. Lovecraft never wrote (or, rather, sold) enough fiction to be a professional writer; instead, his income was provided by an ever-dwindling family inheritance and by the dreary task of literary revision and ghost-writing. This work ran the gamut from textbooks to poetry to novels to articles; but on occasion Lovecraft attracted revision clients who wished to write horror tales, and his "revisions" of the works of such tyros as Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop, Adolphe de Castro, and others are often tantamount to original composition.

 In 1921, however, Lovecraft domestic life was powerfully affected by the death of his mother after a long illness. Mrs. Lovecraft, her frail constitution destroyed by the death of her husband under peculiar circumstances (it is likely that he, a traveling salesman, died from some form of syphilis, although the evidence now seems conclusive that Lovecraft himself was not congenitally syphilitic) and pathologically overprotective of her only child, died in a sanitarium; the immediate cause of death, however, was a badly managed gall bladder operation. Lovecraft, stunned by the blow, felt himself again on the brink of suicide, but the sentiment did not last long: a month after his mother's death he attended an amateur journalism convention in Boston, where he met the woman who was to become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian Jew seven years older than Lovecraft, but he was captivated by her devotion to amateur letters and what on the surface appeared to be a similar view of the world. Their courtship cut short a budding romance (of which we know very little) between Lovecraft and the amateur poet Winifred Virginia Jackson, but it took three years for Lovecraft and Sonia to decide on marriage. When they did so Lovecraft told his aunts by letter after the ceremony had taken place at St. Paul's Cathedral in New York; perhaps he feared that Sonia's racial heritage, and the fact that she ran a successful millinery shop on Fifth Avenue, would not have met with the approval of two elderly ladies of old New England stock.
 
 Lovecraft settled down to the reposeful existence he had known before Sonia and New York; but it was not the same Lovecraft who saw only the eighteenth century or classical antiquity and ignored the modern world; nor was it a Lovecraft who buried himself away as in the 1908-13 period. Instead, after a flurry of literary activity such as he never experienced before or after – in six months he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Silver Key," The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "The Colour out of Space," and several other works, as well as completing the treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature begun in late 1925 in New York – he became, in the last ten years of his life, the man who most comes to mind when we hear the name Lovecraft: the author of tales of cosmic horror; the center of a vast and ever-increasing web of epistolary ties with literary figures in the field (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Vincent Starrett, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffmann Price, Henry S. Whitehead, and others); the seeker of antiquarian sites all along the eastern part of the continent – Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charleston, St. Augustine, New Orleans, Key West; the elder statesman of fantasy who, in the thirties, served as the fountainhead and mentor for many young fans and writers (Robert Bloch, J. Vernon Shea, R. H. Barlow, Charles D. Hornig, Julius Schwartz, Donald A. Wollheim, Duane W. Rimel, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, James Blish, and many others).


 By 1930 Lovecraft had published many tales in Weird Tales and "The Colour out of Space" in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories; but when would a book bearing his name appear? There had been a half-dozen pamphlets issued by amateur publishers, and W. Paul Cook's stillborn edition of The Shunned House (sheets printed in 1928) held Lovecraft in anticipation to his death. In the late 1920s Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales had toyed with the idea of a collection of Lovecraft tales (to be called – prophetically enough – The Outsider and Other Stories), but the plan had come to nothing. Then, in 1931, G. P. Putnam's Sons asked to look at some of Lovecraft stories; their eventual rejection, coinciding with the rejection by Wright of At the Mountains of Madness (regarded by Lovecraft as his most ambitious work), gave Lovecraft a severe setback. Always sensitive to criticism, he later admitted that this double rejection "did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career". Later efforts by Vanguard, Knopf, Loring & Mussey, and William Morrow to issue a collection of tales or a novel also came to nothing, and Lovecraft later work is increasingly tinged with self-doubt: "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931) went through two, perhaps three drafts; "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), one of his poorest later efforts, was written frenetically in pencil, as was "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933); "The Shadow out of Time" (1934-35) went through at least two drafts. In 1936 Lovecraft made what to us seems the astonishing assertion that "I'm farther from doing what I want to do than I was 20 years ago" . Lovecraft may have gained some pleasure at finally moving into a historic house at 66 College Street in 1933 (the house dates to ca. 1825) and at his increasing glorification by the early fantasy fandom movement; but one wonders whether the sense of frustration pervading his later work had anything to do with his failure to seek medical help for the cancer of the intestine that ultimately killed him, and whose symptoms had begun to be evident at least two years before his death. Or did he fear a repetition of the bungled operation that had robbed him of his mother? In any case, when Lovecraft entered Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on 10 March 1937, all that could be done was to give him morphine to ease the pain. He died five days later and was buried in the Phillips family plot in Swan Point Cemetery. Only recently has a separate marker been erected on his grave, the funds contributed by many of his posthumous admirers; the stone reads: "I am Providence."

 In the short term Lovecraft reputation will certainly rest upon his sixty or so short stories, novelettes, and short novels, and it is right that the bulk of the articles in this volume focus upon them. I myself can only touch upon the broadest features of his fiction here, and then dwell briefly on other bodies of his work.
 A useful starting-point for the study of the philosophy of Lovecraft fiction is his own epochal statement of 1927:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relations to the cosmos – to the unknown – which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.


 What we derive from Lovecraft later fiction is a brutal sense of mankind's hopelessly infinitesimal place in the cosmic scheme of things. In Lovecraft fictional cosmos, successive waves of alien races (they are always whole cultures or civilizations, not isolated individuals) came to the earth millions of years ago, erected vast cities, held sway over enormous empires, and finally vanished long before the advent of humanity. Each of these races is incalculably superior to us – physically, intellectually, and most telling of all, aesthetically. The Great Race in "The Shadow out of Time" have a vast archive full of documents about all the species in the cosmos; the record for mankind is housed on the "lowest or vertebrate section." Worse, the Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness, who came from the stars and established themselves in Antarctica, are "supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake." We are merely the inconsequential and accidental byproduct of another race.
 
 Lovecraft saw his deficiencies as a poet fairly early on; he knew that his real purpose in such things as "Old Christmas" (1917) or "Myrrha and Strephon" (1919) was not aesthetic expression but undiluted antiquarianism. Lovecraft remained faithful to the eighteenth-century poets, although he came to regard as the true giants of English poetry such Romantics as Keats and Shelley and such of his predecessors and contemporaries as the early Swinburne and Yeats. And yet, given his belief that poetry should be "simple, direct, non-intellectual, clothed in symbols & images rather than ideas and statements" (6) – a definition he used to denigrate the Metaphysicals just then reviving in critical esteem – he seemed to realize amazingly early that there may have been something lacking in his beloved Dryden and Pope: "I am aware that my favourite Georgians lacked much in the spirit of poesy – but I do admire their verse, as verse."(7) This was written in 1918; and although it is not quite an echo of Matthew Arnold's claim that Dryden and Pope were really masters of English prose, it at least acknowledges that the Georgians' principal virtue was not poetic instinct but metrical dexterity. In any case, the unfortunate result of Lovecraft early adoption of the verse forms of the early eighteenth century is a mass of perfectly competent (from a metrical standpoint) but entirely lifeless and contentless poetry up to about 1925, with only intermittent points of interest: a number of pungent satires, from "Ad Criticos" (1913-14) to "Medusa: A Portrait" (1921);(8) the flawless Georgianism of "Sunset" (1917); the exquisite self-parodies "On the Death of a Rhyming Critic" (1917) and "The Dead Bookworm" (1919). The horrific verse – from "The Poe-et's Nightmare" (1916), with its potent blank-verse distillation of his cosmic philosophy, to the brooding "A Cycle of Verse" (1919) – retains a little more life, although we could do without such mechanical Poe pastiches as "The House" (1919) or "The Nightmare Lake" (1919).

 Curiously enough, however, Lovecraft got away from all this. From 1922 to 1928 he wrote almost no poetry: clearly his creative energies had shifted to fiction. Even some of this poetry reveals an incipient shaking off of eighteenth-century models: "My Favourite Character" and "A Year Off" (both 1925) have something of the flavor of Locker-Lampson and the vers de société of the later nineteenth century, and could well have been influenced by Rheinhart Kleiner, an unknown master of this light form. But then – suddenly – we come upon the sonnet "Recapture" (November 1929; later incorporated into Fungi from Yuggoth), which is so unlike anything Lovecraft had written before that both Winfield Townley Scott and Edmund Wilson were led to suspect (groundlessly, as it happens) that in it, as well as in the rest of Fungi from Yuggoth (1929-30), Lovecraft was influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson. But if we study Lovecraft aesthetic thought of this time we may learn that the change was perhaps not so sudden. By 1928 he is already railing against the use of the archaisms, inversions, and "poetic language" that had cluttered his earlier verse. He had begun to realize that living poetry cannot wear the garments of a prior day, and saw that his own previous poetry had merely been a vast psychological game he had played with himself – an attempt to retreat into the eighteenth century as feeble and pathetic as his longing for a periwig and knee-breeches. But when he sent "Recapture" to a correspondent, he added the note: "Speaking of my stuff – I enclose another recent specimen illustrative of my efforts to practice what I preach regarding direct and unaffected diction – a sort of irregular semi-sonnet, based on an actual dream."(9)
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S.T. Joshi is H.P. Lovecraft leading critic and biographer, the author of H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990) and H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996). He has edited numerous collections of Lovecraft writing, as well as collections of critical essays. He is the editor of Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, and is currently pursuing research on Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling.