H. P. Lovecraft

• 1. Introduction

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  Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on the 15th of March 1937, at the age of 46, virtually unknown to the reading public. He kept a diary of his terminal cancer until he was too weak to hold a pen, an act in keeping with his lifelong scientific curiosity. He had spent most of his life in New England, almost exclusively published in pulp magazines, never once able to support himself from his earnings. And yet a man who died in obscurity now stands as one of the most significant authors of supernatural horror of the twentieth century. How does a writer go from a small funeral in Providence to a name attached to an entire genre, the adjective Lovecraftian, and a fictional universe that outlived him by generations? The answers run through a haunted childhood, a marriage that took him to New York, a philosophy that shrank humanity to nothing, and a circle of friends who carried his vision forward after he was gone.

• 2. A House Of Grief

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  In April 1893, after a psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel, Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital in Providence. His son was not yet three. Winfield spent five years there before dying in 1898, his death certificate listing general paresis, a term synonymous with late-stage syphilis. Throughout his life, Lovecraft maintained instead that his father had fallen into a paralytic state from insomnia and overwork. Whether he was kept ignorant or deliberately misleading was never determined.

  Whipple Van Buren Phillips, Lovecraft's maternal grandfather, became the father figure in the absence left behind. Lovecraft later called him the centre of my entire universe. Whipple encouraged a love of classical literature and English poetry, and invented original weird tales of winged horrors and deep, low, moaning sounds for the boy's entertainment. By the age of three Lovecraft was already reading and writing, and he traded letters with his traveling grandfather.

  The death of his grandmother Robie in 1896 sent the family, in Lovecraft's words, into a gloom from which it never fully recovered. His mother and aunts wore black mourning dresses that terrified him. Around five and a half, he began having recurring nightmares of beings he called night-gaunts, which he credited to Gustave Doré's illustrations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They would whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, he wrote, fretting and impelling me with their detestable tridents. Thirty years later, the night-gaunts appeared in his fiction.

• 3. The Collapse Of Fortune

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  By 1900, the business concerns of Whipple Phillips were in a downturn, and the family's wealth eroded slowly. In the spring of 1904, his largest venture failed catastrophically, and within months he died at age 70 of a stroke. Susie Lovecraft could no longer support the expansive family home and moved with her son to a small duplex. Lovecraft called this one of the darkest periods of his life. In a 1934 letter he recalled seeing no point in living and considering suicide, saved only by his scientific curiosity about the world.

  In 1908, before what would have been his high school graduation, Lovecraft suffered a severe and unidentified health crisis. He described it variously as a nervous collapse and a sort of breakdown, writing that he was prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness. He never graduated and never attended school again, abandoning his plan to attend Brown University. A classmate recalled terrible tics, that he would suddenly up and jump from his seat. The psychology professor Harry K. Brobst later suggested chorea minor as the probable cause of his childhood symptoms, and a hysteroid seizure, a term synonymous with atypical depression, for the 1908 breakdown.

• 4. From Feud To Fiction

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  A 1913 letter to the pulp magazine Argosy changed the course of Lovecraft's life. Writing to criticize Fred Jackson, one of the magazine's prominent writers, Lovecraft called Jackson's stories trivial, effeminate, and, in places, coarse, and laced his attacks with racist invective. The letters sparked a nearly year-long feud, with his most prominent opponent John Russell replying in verse. The feud caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, head editor of the United Amateur Press Association, who invited both men to join. Lovecraft joined the UAPA in April 1914.

  For most of the following decade Lovecraft immersed himself in amateur journalism, arguing for its superiority over what he called commercialism. He rose to chairman of the Department of Public Criticism, then vice-president, then president, using his platform to champion archaic English usage and to disparage Americanisms and slang. In 1916 he published his first short story in the UAPA journal, a departure from his usual verse. Encouraged by W. Paul Cook, he turned to prose fiction, soon writing The Tomb, heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, and Dagon, considered the first work to display the themes he became known for.

  The death of his mother shadowed this rejuvenation. After a nervous breakdown, Susie was committed to Butler Hospital in March 1919, like her husband before her. She died there on the 24th of May 1921, from complications of a gallbladder operation five days earlier. Lovecraft wrote that the loss crippled him physically and emotionally, and again wished his life might end. His later response, though, was relief at being able to live independently, and his physical health began to improve.

• 5. The New York Years

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  Lovecraft married Sonia Greene on the 3rd of March 1924 and moved to her Brooklyn apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue. She believed he needed to leave Providence to flourish and was willing to support him. On her home cooking his weight climbed to 200 lb. He was enthralled by the city at first, gathering a circle of literary friends informally dubbed the Kalem Club who urged him to submit to Weird Tales. Its editor Edwin Baird accepted many of his stories, including Under the Pyramids, ghostwritten for Harry Houdini.

  The enthusiasm did not last. Greene lost her business and her assets vanished in a bank failure, and her work required constant travel to Cleveland and Cincinnati. Lovecraft, lacking marketable skills, moved to a small apartment on 169 Clinton Street at the edge of Red Hook, a place that came to discomfort him greatly. His single room was burgled, leaving him with only the clothes he wore. In August 1925 he wrote The Horror at Red Hook and He, the latter declaring that my coming to New York had been a mistake, that he had found only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

  It was in this despair that he outlined The Call of Cthulhu, with its theme of the insignificance of all humanity. He also wrote Supernatural Horror in Literature, which became one of the most influential essays on the subject. By 1926, having lost roughly 40 lb, he left for Providence.

• 6. I Am Providence

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  Back home, Lovecraft lived with his aunts in a spacious brown Victorian wooden house at 10 Barnes Street, before moving in 1933 to 66 Prospect Street, his final home. This period produced some of his most prominent works, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Shadow over Innsmouth. Scholars read the former two as partly autobiographical, one about his return to the city and the other about Providence itself. He began antiquarian travels along the eastern seaboard, visiting in 1930 places such as Brattleboro, Charleston, and Quebec City.

  In August 1930, Robert E. Howard wrote to Weird Tales praising a reprint of The Rats in the Walls, and the two writers began a vigorous correspondence that lasted the rest of Howard's life. Howard joined the Lovecraft Circle, a group bound through Lovecraft's voluminous letters, in which he introduced like-minded friends and urged them to share characters and creations. Affecting indifference to his reception, Lovecraft was in truth extremely sensitive to criticism, often giving up on a story after a single rejection. He left The Case of Charles Dexter Ward untyped and never sold it.

  The end came quickly. On the 11th of June 1936, Howard learned his comatose mother would not wake and killed himself with a pistol; the death deeply affected Lovecraft, who wrote a memoir titled In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard. Fearing doctors, Lovecraft was not examined until a month before his death, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the small intestine. He was buried in Swan Point Cemetery, listed on the Phillips family monument. In 1977, fans erected a separate headstone inscribed with the phrase I AM PROVIDENCE, drawn from one of his letters.

• 7. An Indifferent Cosmos

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  Cosmicism sat at the center of everything Lovecraft wrote. The philosophy holds that humanity is an insignificant force in the universe, subject to powerful beings that are not malevolent so much as indifferent. He called himself a cosmic indifferentist, believing in a meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring universe that human beings could never fully understand. He first articulated this in 1921 but did not fully fold it into his fiction until five years later, with The Call of Cthulhu introducing the idea of alien influences that came to dominate his work.

  Forbidden knowledge ran alongside it. In Lovecraft's stories, happiness was achievable only through blissful ignorance, and seeking what was not meant to be known led to harm. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward turns on the danger of knowing too much about one's family history, its protagonist driven to madness through genealogical research. His protagonists do not learn that they are insignificant; they already know it, and have it confirmed through an event.

  Decline was his other great fixation. From the 1920s, Lovecraft absorbed the work of Oswald Spengler, whose thesis on the decadence of the West gave shape to ideas Lovecraft had developed independently. Spenglerian imagery of cyclical decay runs through At the Mountains of Madness. The scholar S. T. Joshi placed Spengler at the center of his study H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, arguing that decline is the single idea connecting Lovecraft's whole philosophy.

• 8. The Circle Carries On

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  August Derleth founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei after Lovecraft's death, to keep his works in print. Where Lovecraft treated his pantheon of alien gods as a mere plot device, Derleth built an entire cosmology, complete with a war between good Elder Gods and evil Outer Gods, and tied different gods to the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water. This did not line up with Lovecraft's original vision, but Derleth's ownership of Arkham House gave him an authority that held until his death in 1971.

  The revival reached far beyond one publisher. Lovecraft acquired the status of a cult writer in the counterculture of the 1960s, and a body of scholarly work, called Lovecraft studies, emerged in the early 1970s. The reviewer Michael Dirda described him as rightly regarded as second only to Edgar Allan Poe in the annals of American supernatural literature. Stephen King called him the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale and named him the largest influence on his writing. Alan Moore, John Carpenter, and Guillermo del Toro have all credited his influence.

  The institutional recognition followed. In 2005, the Library of America published a volume of his works that sold 25,000 copies within a month, which scholars said confirmed his place in the western canon. The first World Fantasy Awards, held in Providence in 1975, took the theme The Lovecraft Circle, and winners received a bust of Lovecraft nicknamed the Howard. In November 2015, the award announced it would no longer model its trophy on him, in response to his views on race, the most controversial part of a legacy that has only grown louder since.