Howard Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. He spent most of his years completely detached from the world and the era he lived in. He died in 1937 at the age of 47. Lovecraft was a devoted scholar of the antiquities of his city, and perhaps his ancestry gave him the natural inclination that made him an Anglophile throughout his life. His health was not very stable in his early years, so he spent them sheltered within his family, and this partial incapacity allowed him to read continuously. As a result, the sensitive, dreamy child created a strange world of his own early on, haunted by the creatures of his imagination. Much of his novels, which belonged to the realm of the supernatural, developed from this world. From a very young age, he showed signs of his poetic ability, and at the age of 15, he wrote his first short story. As a child, Lovecraft was shy, and as an adult, he was distant, almost isolated. He was tall, thin, and usually pale, although he had bright and very lively eyes. His jaw was prominent. His character was gentle. His conversation revealed an astonishingly rich vocabulary and an immediate use of words, a fact evident in his novels. In the two decades that his writing life lasted, Lovecraft became a master of the macabre, and in his time, there was no equal to him in America. He began writing early but failed to publish anything in any widely circulated magazine. Having British ancestors, his literary influences were rather British—mainly Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany—and not the American Gothic tradition of Poe. Lovecraft's works were never published on a large scale during his lifetime, and only a small novella appeared printed and bound by an amateur but enthusiastic publisher. About 50 of his stories were published in magazines, primarily in "Weird Tales," "Amazing Stories," and "Astounding Science Fiction." His work was compiled in an anthology in his homeland and in England, but only two years after his death, an anthology titled "The Outsider and Others" was published by "Arkham House" (created by Derleth in collaboration with D. Wandrei, with the aim of republishing Lovecraft's works), containing his best stories and becoming one of the most valuable collectible items in America. This volume was followed by "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," "Marginalia," "The Lurker at the Threshold" (a novella completed by Derleth), and "Something About Cats and Other Pieces," all of which contained less significant works. Although his early works were particularly fantastical, influenced by Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft quickly turned to themes of cosmic horror and spiritual dread, in notable stories like "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Whisperer in Darkness," and others. Among these is the unique horror story "The Rats in the Walls," which may be the best of its kind written in America in the 1920s. Shortly after the appearance of these stories in magazines, the pattern that later became known as the "Cthulhu Mythos" began to emerge clearly in his work, named after "The Call of Cthulhu," the first story to clearly reveal Lovecraft's design. Lovecraft wrote only three novels among many short stories and novellas. The most ambitious of these is "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," written in 1927-1928 but not published until 1941, when an abridged version appeared in the magazine "Weird Tales." The entire novel was published in 1943 in the magazine "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," and since then, it has been serialized in England, while in America, it was made into a typical horror film starring Vincent Price in the lead role, titled "The Haunted Palace of Edgar Allan Poe." The second in size is the novel "At the Mountains of Madness," written in 1931, which preceded the larger novel in terms of publication dates, where something abridged was also published. The third, titled "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," was likely conceived as an idea and written long before the other novels, around early 1924-1925, but unlike those novels, it was apparently never revised. It is not part of the "Cthulhu Mythos," to which both "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At the Mountains of Madness" belong, but certain aspects of it were borrowed from the Mythos. It rather belongs to an earlier period of Lovecraft's work when he was evidently under the influence of Lord Dunsany.