Great Authors:
An AOIT webpage assignment created by Sittipong Sayphrarath

 Childhood 

    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 to his 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.  

    Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child and was said to have suffered from a rare disease known as poikilothermism, the result of which made him always feel cold to the touch. He attended school only sporadically but he read much. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette.

    Lovecraft wrote fiction as a youth, but then set it aside for some time in favour of poetry and essays, before returning to fiction in 1917 with more polished stories such as The Tomb and Dagon. The latter was his first professionally published work, appearing in Weird Tales in 1923. Also around this time he began to build up his huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century.
Lovecraft's mother also was committed to the Butler Hospital, where she died from surgical complications on May 21, 1921.

 Adolescence

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).

The prodigious fecundity of Lovecraft's early writing indicates not only precocity but considerable leisure; indeed, Lovecraft's 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.

Early Adulthood

Lovecraft was freed from this sequestration in a very curious way. Having fallen into the habit of reading the popular magazines of the day, especially some of the early Munsey pulps (The Argosy, The All-Story, etc.), Lovecraft became so irked at the contributions of a romance writer, Fred Jackson, that he wrote a verse epistle to the editor in protest. No doubt Lovecraft thought nothing of resurrecting the eighteenth-century verse satire in 1913, but the thing must have amused the editor, for he printed it. There followed a series of rebuttals back and forth between Lovecraft and those who defended Jackson, and this battle was observed by Edward F. Daas of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA); he urged the leading participants of the fray to join the order, and Lovecraft promptly did so.

The UAPA (and its rival, the National Amateur Press Association, which Lovecraft later joined) was a group of amateur writers who wrote and published their own journals – some of them very crude, others quite distinguished. Lovecraft joined the organization in early 1914, and for the next decade produced an astonishing amount of amateur writing: he edited thirteen issues of his own paper, The Conservative; he contributed essays and poems to scores of other journals; he edited the official organ of the UAPA, The United Amateur, and served as President and as Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism. It was as if a lifeline had been extended to a drowning man: Lovecraft, of frail health, ashamed of his inability to attend Brown University and gain a college degree, buried in a world of his own making that was increasingly remote from reality, was finally rescued by a band of amateur writers with aspirations like his own – so he fancied – but with viewpoints often differing significantly from his. Lovecraft's formidable intellect and literary skill raised him quickly to prominence in the field (a prominence he still holds as one of the pillars of the amateur movement), but Lovecraft knew that he had received as much from amateurdom as he gave it:


Adulthood

It is in the amateur world that Lovecraft recommenced the writing of fiction. His associates – notably W. Paul Cook – praised the juvenile tales that he allowed to be printed – "The Beast in the Cave" (1905), "The Alchemist" (1908) – and urged him to write more. Lovecraft did so, producing "The Tomb" and "Dagon" in quick succession in the summer of 1917; from then on he maintained a steady if sparse flow of fiction until his death. But until at least 1922 Lovecraft regarded himself more as a poet and essayist than as a fiction writer – in sheer volume his collected verse and nonfiction dwarf his fiction threefold.

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's 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's 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.

Was Lovecraft's marriage doomed to failure? It is easy to say such a thing after the fact, but there is no reason to believe it. Who knows what might have happened had a series of disasters not hit the couple almost immediately upon their marriage? – the collapse of Sonia's shop; the inability of Lovecraft to find a job in New York; Sonia's ill health, which forced her to leave the household and seek recuperation in various rest homes; and, perhaps most important, Lovecraft's growing horror of New York – its oppressive size, the hordes of "aliens" at every corner, its emphasis on speed, money, and commercialism. The many friends Lovecraft had in the city – Samuel Loveman, Rheinhart Kleiner, Arthur Leeds, and especially the young poet and fantaisiste Frank Belknap Long, Jr. – were not enough to ward off depression and even incipient madness. On 1 January 1925, after only ten months of cohabitation with Sonia, Lovecraft moved into a single room in a squalid area of Brooklyn, as his wife left to seek employment in the Midwest; she thereafter returned only intermittently to New York.

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's 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's 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" (SL 5.224). 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's 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" (SL 5.224). 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 whos    e 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."