H.P. Lovecraft

American · 1890 to 1937

Born Howard Phillips Lovecraft on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, he was the only child of a traveling salesman who was committed to Butler Hospital when the boy was three and died there of syphilis-related illness five years later. Raised by his mother, two aunts, and his maternal grandfather, the businessman Whipple Van Buren Phillips, he found his education in the family library, reading Poe and Greco-Roman mythology and the night sky through a telescope. A sickly, nervous child, he attended school only intermittently and never received a diploma, a failure that shamed him for life. He came to fiction sideways, through amateur journalism, then began selling stories to the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923. Most of his enduring work followed: "The Colour Out of Space" (1927), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), and "The Dunwich Horror" (1929) built a mythos of vast, indifferent cosmic forces that dwarf and unhinge the humans who glimpse them. At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 and serialized in 1936, sends an Antarctic expedition into the ruins of a pre-human civilization. He married Sonia Greene in 1924 and moved to Brooklyn, but the marriage failed and he returned to Providence in 1926, where he kept up an enormous correspondence, writing perhaps a hundred thousand letters. He earned almost nothing and was nearly forgotten at his death. He died of intestinal cancer on March 15, 1937, in Providence, at the age of forty-six. His friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publisher Arkham House to keep his work in print, and it slowly found the readers he never had.