Howard Phillips Lovecraft

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island.
His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, his father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman. When Lovecraft was three his father suffered a nervous breakdown and remained hospitalised until his death 5 years later in 1898.
With the death of Lovecraft’s father, his upbringing was left to his mother assisted by 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.
One of his early favourites was the Arabian Nights, which he read by the age of five; and at this time heused the pseudonym “Abdul Alhazred” Within a year his interests were transferred to Greek mythology by his readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He adapted the later in his earliest surviving poem “The Poem of Ulysses” (1897),
However at about this time Lovecraft became interested in weird fiction and it is for this that he is mainly known. This was sparked by his grandfather who would tell the infant Lovecraft home made tales in the Gothic style
Lovecraft was lonely as a boy and suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. His school attendance was constantly interrupted, but he more than made up for this by independent reading. At about the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy and he began to produce his own journals which he duplicated and distributed amongst his few friends.
Fortunately when he began 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 the public eye occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly thereafter he began writing several columns for a variety of periodicals
     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. The family were forced to move out of their own home into less spacious lodgings. Lovecraft was greatly affected by the loss of his birthplace, and apparently contemplated suicide by drowning in the nearby Barrington River.
In 1908, just prior to his graduation from high school, he suffered a nervous breakdown that compelled him to leave school without a diploma so of course he was unable to continue his studies at University, a fact that greatly embarassed Lovecraft in later years.
From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests and his poetry writing. Lovecraft emerged from his isolation in a strange way. He wrote a verse letter to a "pulp" publication (Argosy) attacking the insipid love stories of Fred Jackson. This letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson’s defenders. This resulted in a series of poem-letters both in Argosy and ssimilar magazines, often in the style of Dryden and Pope.
This correspondency was noticed by Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), and Daas invited Lovecraft to join the UAPA which Lovecraft did in 1914. Lovecraft eventually became President and Official Editor of the UAPA, and also served briefly as President of the rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA).
Lovecraft began an ever increasing flow, initially mising poetry and fiction although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still his dominant mode of literary expression. He also corresponded at length and eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century.
Lovecraft’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to the same hospital as her husband and, like him, died there.
Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of his mother but quickly met and subsequently married Sonia Haft Greene. His new wife was a Russian Jew seven years Lovecraft’s senior. Lovecraft moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good. things however soon went sour. Sonia's own business, a hat shop, went bust and her health deteriorated. Lovecraft although an established writer and editor, had difficulty in obtaining "real work" and when Sonia went to Cleveland to take up a new job there he stayed in a single apartment near the seedy Brooklyn area called Red Hook and his writings became increasingly more bleak.
In 1926 plans were made for Lovecraft to return to Providence with his aunts but they barred Sonia from coming to Providence to start a business; their precious nephew could not be seen to have a wife whho was in "business". The marriage was essentially over, and a divorce in 1929 was inevitable.
This move back to Providence marked the most prolific period of Lovecraft's career as a writer, but not unfortunately as a poet.
As a man of letters Lovecraft nurtured the careers of many young writers (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became involved in politics (this was the time of the Great depression)
Lovecraft died, of cancer, on 15 March 1937. Surprisingly for such a prolific writer Lovecraft had never had a true book published in his own lifetime with the exception of one poorly produced volume [The shadow Over Innsmouth in 1936] his writing was mainly confined to the amateur or professional pulp magazines. Fortunately some of his many correspondents were determined to commemorate his name and two, August Derleth and donald Wandrei, formed a publishing firm, Arkham House, to publish his work. this began with The Outsider and Others in 1939 but was followed by many others in hardback and then in paperback and transaltions into a dozen languages.