1 Biography

Lovecraft was born in his family home at 194 (then 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestors in America back to their arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. When Lovecraft was three his father was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years. The story of mental collapse was merely a cover, however, to save the family from embarrassment — Lovecraft's father was admitted because syphilis was killing him.

Lovecraft was raised by his mother, two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his doting grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips . Lovecraft was something of a prodigy and was reciting poetry at age two and was writing by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as 1,001 Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and child's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred young Howard's interest in the weird by telling him original tales of Gothic horror.

Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child. 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.

Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, and the family was subsequently impoverished by mismanagement of his property and money. The family was forced to move down Angell Street to much smaller and less comfortable accommodations. Lovecraft was deeply affected by the loss of his home and birthplace and even contemplated suicide for a time. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908, as a result of which he never received his high school diploma. This failure to complete his education — his hopes of ever entering Brown University dashed — nagged at him for the rest of his life.

Lovecraft's first polished stories began to appear around 1917 with The Tomb and Dagon. 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. Among his correspondents were the young Forrest J. Ackerman, Robert Bloch ( Psycho) and Robert E. Howard ( Conan the Barbarian series).

Lovecraft's mother died from surgical complications on May 21, 1921. Shortly after, he attended an amateur journalist convention where he met Sonia Greene . She was Ukrainian, a Jew, and, having been born in 1883, several years older than Lovecraft. They married, though Lovecraft's aunts were unhappy with the arrangement. The couple moved to the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City. He hated it. A few years later he and Greene agreed to an amicable divorce, and he returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.

The period after his return to Providence — the last decade of his life — was Lovecraft's most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing.

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death the following year ( 1937) in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft's grave in Providence has from time to time been inscribed with a graffito of his most famous turn of phrase, quoted from The Call of Cthulhu (though originating from The Nameless City):

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

2 Racism controversy

Modern readers are often upset by apparent themes of racism in Lovecraft's stories. Particularly of note are the two pieces "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Street," in which he describes the immigrants of his day as decadent and potentially dangerous. Some of his stories, such as The Shadow over Innsmouth and Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, warn against the dangers of miscegenation. Still others, such as Herbert West: Reanimator contain overtly racist depictions of non- white races, Poles, Czechs, Jews and the immigrant population. However, many scholars agree that the racism of his work does not demerit their inherent quality but for a few instances, as in The Street.

Lovecraft's personal correspondence indicates that he did indeed hold racist beliefs, making statements such as, "The Negro is fundamentally the biologically inferior of all White and even Mongolian races." ([1]) However, Lovecraft's racism seems to have been limited to the theoretical level, and did not have much impact on his behavior. As noted above, despite his views on mixing races, Lovecraft's wife Sonia was Jewish. Many Lovecraft historians attribute his racism to xenophobia caused by his insular upbringing, and note that Lovecraft became more open-minded in his attitudes as he grew older. Indeed, originally an ultra-conservative, towards the end of his life (post-1927) his writings reveal the gradual change in his political beliefs and theories. Moreover, the overt racism found in his earlier writings all but disappears towards the end of his career. It is notable that these changes occur after his exposure to the greater world in New York City. Further evidence of the almost radical change that he undergoes can be found in Shadow Out of Time where he depicts a perfect society based on a socialistic system, a reflection of his theories on government at the time. Also to be considered is his disavowing of the blatantly xenophonic earlier piece titled The Street. And in many ways, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems to be a reworking of The Horror at Red Hook without the prolific xenophobia. Nevertheless, it remains true that the still maturing Lovecraft had harbored intense feelings of xenophobia and racism. Further to be considered are the protagonist's hereditary situation in Shadow over Innsmouth (1931) and Lovecraft's discovery in 1928 of an Irish strain in his own ancestry.

A thorough self-written summary of his politically incorrect views on race and culture can be found in the book Selected Letters IV, published by Arkham House, in letter 648 to J. Vernon Shea, written September 25, 1933.

3 Survey of Lovecraft's work

The definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction are published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a lot of other fantastic literature as well.

Lovecraft's poetry is collected in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft, while much of his juvenilia, various essays on philosophical, political and literary topics, antiquarian travelogues, and other things, can be found in Miscellaneous Writings. Also, Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, first published in 1927, is an historical survey of horror literature available with endnotes as The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature.

3.1 Letters

Despite the fact that Lovecraft is mostly known for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of Lovecraft's writing mainly consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history. S. T. Joshi estimates that Lovecraft wrote about 87,500 letters from 1912 until his death in 1937 — one famous letter from November 9, 1929 to Woodburn Harris being 70 pages in length.

Lovecraft was not a very active letter-writer in youth. In 1931 he admitted: "In youth I scarcely did any letter-writing - thanking anybody for a present was so much of an ordeal that I would rather have written a two hundred fifty-line pastoral or a twenty-page treatise on the rings of Saturn." (SL 3.369–70). The initial interest in letters stemmed from his correspondence with his cousin Phillips Gamwell but even more important was his involvement in the amateur journalism movement, which was responsible for the enormous number of letters Lovecraft produced.

Lovecraft clearly states that his contact to numerous different people through letter-writing was one of the main factors in broadening his view of the world: "I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge." (SL 4.389).

Today there are four publishing houses that have released letters from Lovecraft — Arkham House with its five-volume edition Selected Letters being the most prominent. Other publishers are Hippocampus Press (Letters to Alfred Galpin et al.), Night Shade Books (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei et al.) and Necronomicon Press (Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett et al).

4 Further reading

In the past few decades, the quantity of books about Lovecraft has increased considerably. Also, Lovecraft's stories themselves have enjoyed a veritable publishing renaissance in recent years. The titles mentioned below are a small sampling.

Lovecraft, a Biography, written by L. Sprague de Camp, published in 1975, and now out of print, was Lovecraft's first full-length biography. Frank Belknap Long's Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side ( Arkham House, 1975) presents a more personal look at Lovecraft's life, combining reminiscence, biography, and literary criticism. Long was a friend and correspondent of Lovecraft, as well as a fellow fantasist who wrote a number of Lovecraft-influenced Cthulhu Mythos stories (including The Hounds of Tindalos). A newer, more extensive biography is H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, written by Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi. It is also currently out of print, and used copies are rare, but an adequate alternative is Joshi's abridged A Dreamer & A Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time.

Other significant Lovecraft-related works are An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (informative but expensive) and Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue (a meticulous listing of many of the books in Lovecraft's now scattered library), both by Joshi, and also Lovecraft at Last, an account by Willis Conover of his teenage correspondence with Lovecraft. For those interested in studying in detail Lovecraft's writings and philosophy, Joshi's A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft is useful both for the analysis it provides and for the thorough bibliography appended to it. Charles P. Mitchell 's The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography is practicable for its discussion of films containing Lovecraftian elements (see Adaptations, below).

Lovecraft's prose fiction has been published numerous times, but, even after the "corrected texts" were released by Arkham House in the 1980s, many non-definitive collections of his stories have appeared, including Ballantine Books editions and, also, three popular Del Rey editions, which nonetheless have interesting introductions. The two collections published by Penguin, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, incorporate the modifications made in the corrected texts.

Many readers, when they first encounter Lovecraft's works, find his writing style difficult to read — owing, no doubt, to his fondness for adjectives, long paragraphs, and archaic diction. Also, Lovecraft's early 20th century perspective yielded references in his works to objects and ideas that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. Some of Lovecraft's writings, however, are annotated, meaning that they are accompanied by explanatory footnotes (at the bottom, or foot, of the page) or endnotes (at the end of the book). In addition to the Penguin editions mentioned above and The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, Joshi has produced The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft as well as More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, both of which are footnoted extensively.

Lastly, The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft presents an excellent and extensive study of Lovecraft's use of language, which further reveals the depth of his writings.

5 Lovecraft's writing phases

Lovecraft had three very distinct categories of fiction in which he wrote during his life. Although the groups' stories were often written in overlapping time periods with the other groups, there were still periods where almost all of Lovecraft's writings could be categorized in one of the below mentioned groups. It should be noted that these distinctions have been drawn by others and not by Lovecraft himself.

• Macabre stories (approximately 1905–1920)
• Dream-Cycle stories (approximately 1920–1927)
• Cthulhu Mythos stories (approximately 1925–1935)

6 Bibliography

• List of Works by H. P. Lovecraft
• Lovecraft's miscellaneous writings

7 Books

• From Arkham House:
  • The Dunwich Horror and Others (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • Miscellaneous Writings (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (BooksEnthsiast.com)
• From Ballantine/ Del Rey :
  • The Tomb and Other Tales (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Doom That Came to Sarnath (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • The Road to Madness (BooksEnthsiast.com)
  • (BooksEnthsiast.com)
• From Night Shade Books :
  • The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft (BooksEnthsiast.com)
• From Hippocampus Press:
  • The Shadow out of Time Publishers Page
  • From the Pest Zone: The New York Stories Publishers Page
  • The Annotated Fungi From Yuggoth Publishers Page
  • Collected Essays Publishers Page
  • The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature Publishers Page
  • H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Alfred Galpin Publishers Page
  • H. P. Lovecraft: Letters To Rheinhart Kleiner Publishers Page
  • Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue Publishers Page
  • Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft Publishers Page
  • An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia Publishers Page

8 Adaptations

Films based (generally very loosely) on Lovecraft's works:

• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), an adaptation of the book by the same name (Official Site)
• The Haunted Palace, an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (IMDb entry)
• The Resurrected (1992), another adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) (IMDb entry)
• Re-Animator (1985) (IMDb entry)
• Bride of Re-Animator (1990) (IMDb entry)
• Beyond Re-Animator (2003) (IMDb entry)
• From Beyond (1986) (IMDb entry)
• The Dunwich Horror (1970) (IMDb entry)
• The Unnamable (1988) (IMDb entry)
• The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993) (IMDb entry)
• Dagon (2001) (IMDb entry)
• The Curse (1987) (an unacknowledged 1980s adaptation of " The Colour Out of Space") (IMDb entry)
• Die, Monster, Die! (1965) (another adaptation of "The Colour Out of Space") (IMDb entry)
• In the Mouth of Madness (1995) (satirical John Carpenter horror film about the relationship between horror writers and their audience; a Lovecraft pastiche) (IMDb entry)
• Necronomicon (1994) Three short films based on his stories (The Rats in the Walls, Cool Air, The Whisperer in Darkness) (IMDb entry)

8.1 Radio production

• The Call of Cthulhu (Broadcast in Tasmania, on Lovecraft's 100th birthday)

See also: References to the Cthulhu Mythos

9 External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about .

• The H. P. Lovecraft Archive
• H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu Mythos Information and Forum
• The Cthulhu Lexicon
• When the Stars are Right... (Cthulhu Mythos chronology)
• Essay on Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi
• A number of stories by H.P. Lovecraft
• The HP Lovecraft Film Festival
• Library of Bookz - Biblioteka - Horror - H.P. Lovecraft - (Spiral of Life)

Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P.

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