H.P. Lovecraft: A Brief Biography

A Brief look at the life of one of the all-time masters of horror and the macabre.

by J. Edward Tremlett (Original World of Darkness | The Mythos Project | Resources)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on the 20th of August, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft and Winfield Scott Lovecraft, were quite well-off as his maternal grandfather was a prominent industrialist. This was to prove a good thing for him, as his every childhood interest could be indulged. It would also prove disastrous to his later affairs, as he was never brought up with the idea that he should apply himself towards a well-paying trade; this would leave him in a state of genteel poverty when the family fortunes dwindled.

His father broke down and was institutionalized when H.P. Lovecraft was scarcely three years old. The insanity was almost certainly caused by syphilis, but the medical establishment at the time knew neither the nature nor cure for this condition, and could only lock him up as a madman. The young boy and his mother moved into his grandfather's Victorian home immediately thereafter, and the traumatic event scarred his mother for the rest of her life. Winfield Scott Lovecraft would live for five more years, dying of the disease in 1898.

Chronic nervous conditions -- which are still not fully understood and may have indeed been psychosomatic -- would prevent Lovecraft from regularly attending school, but he never suffered from a lack of learning. Far from it: his early accomplishments speak of a very keen intellect and a high degree of curiosity. He was able to read when he was four, write when he was six, and started to tackle Latin when he was seven.

He was quite interested in the sciences at an early age, learning chemistry at age eight and astronomy at 12. He all but devoured the books in his Grandfather's house in his studies, developing a love for the Georgian era's thought and architecture that would last throughout his life. And though he would jump from interest to interest like a frog evading a ravenous heron, he would rarely ever forsake an old topic of study for a new one.

It was also in his early years that he began to write, and not all of it was horror stories. In fact, a great deal of his visible output at the time was non-fiction: scientific journals and treatises, works on mythology and history, translations and the like. He started a small publication called The Scientific Gazette when he was a mere lad of eight or nine, and the Gazette's run was buttressed by The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy. H.P. would sell these door-to-door, riding on his bicycle.(1)

But the fiction was there, to be sure. His first story, "The Little Glass Bottle," was written when he was six, and was followed by many others. These were horror tales, detective stories and some early attempts at what would later be called science fiction. His greatest influence at the time was Edgar Allan Poe, with healthy doses of Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen.

In 1904, H.P. Lovecraft suffered what he would later admit to being the worst event in his life: the death of his beloved grandfather. The old man's estate was poorly run thereafter, and his family had to leave the great old home for a smaller house. The blow was such that Lovecraft contemplated suicide for a time, but decided against it primarily because there was so much more of the world for him left to see. High School was coming up for him, after all.

His time in High School proved worth waiting for, and was well-spent. He had many friends, played many games and belonged to various clubs and organizations. At this time he first achieved print by writing astronomy columns for the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune. He still wrote fiction, of course, but didn't try to get it published.

In 1908, Lovecraft suffered a severe nervous breakdown which prompted his leaving High School after three years of study. This meant that he would never have been able to attend nearby Brown University and further his education, and he spent the next five years like a hermit, living with his mother and rarely venturing out. His mother's descent into poor mental health had been proceeding steadily along, and she seemed to delight in heaping verbal abuse on her son.

His family's failure to bring him up with a trade in mind took its full toll at this time. Except for what little money he earned from writing, and his ever-decreasing share of the inheritance, he had no money with which to support himself. He stopped writing fiction, and he burned all his earlier stories except for two: "The Beast in the Cave" and "The Alchemist."

He came out of this state in 1914, when he was invited to join the United Amateur Press Association. This put him in contact with other people from around the country, many of whom, like Lovecraft, wished to write for the sake of writing itself as opposed to writing for monetary gain. The environment of amateur journalism was doubtlessly the best place for him at the time, and he thrived in it.

Lovecraft went back into self-publishing, producing thirteen issues ofThe Conservative(1915-1923). He made the acquaintance of several individuals who would become lifelong friends, and both made trips to see them and invited them to his abode. And, perhaps more importantly for his own growth and maturity, he was exposed to ideas that were vastly different from his own, and received criticism of his works and opinions in a nonthreatening and nonacademic manner.

The fiction, for which he is now better known, began to see print at this time. After "The Alchemist" and "The Beast in the Cave" saw print in the amateur press, a colleague encouraged him to continue writing his fantastic tales. It had been nine years since he'd attempted, but he did so, crafting "The Tomb" and "Dagon" in 1917. The output was pretty slow at first, but by 1920 he had mostly shelved the poetry and essays in favor of his stories.

One must note, however, that his output did not see professional print until after 1920; though he read pulp magazines, and doubtlessly took influence from them, he also despised their hackneyed stories as much as he despised the idea of becoming a hack writer for them. He was still very firm in his gentlemanly disdain of working for a living, much less producing art for money.

When he finally did see "real" print, it was when his personal life was in another difficult phase. His mother had been instit utionalized in 1919 in the same hospital her late husband had died in, and she followed after him in death in 1921. Despite her verbal and mental abuse, or perhaps because of it, Lovecraft was shaken for weeks afterward.

Around this time, another colleague in the amateur press founded a humor magazine, and asked Lovecraft to submit a story in six installments -- one that would, preferably, not be too terribly morbid. Lovecraft responded with the six-part "Herbert West -- Reanimator," which is, when carefully looked at, a very funny series of stories parodying Lovecraft's own "serious" horror writing.

In the process of getting over his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalism convention and met Sonia H. Greene. Mrs. Greene was a widowed, Russian-Jewish businesswoman who was seven years older than Lovecraft. Thereafter, Greene visited him several times in Providence, and even managed to get him to visit her in New York on two occasions. They wrote one another extensively, and they decided to marry.

This time also saw the advent of Weird Tales, which many of Lovecraft's friends urged him to submit to. He sent five stories in, and each and every one of them was purchased for publication. Amongst them was "The Rats in the Walls," which had previously been rejected by Argosy-Allstory Weekly. Lovecraft's byline became a frequent sight in Weird Tales for a time: his stories appeared in nine out of 11 of that magazine's issues from late 1923 to early 1925.

Lovecraft's marriage started off a trifle unorthodox: when he and Sonia did marry, in 1924, no one else was informed until after the deed was done. "No one" also included Lovecraft's two aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips, which was a little odd to say the least. The best speculation is that they might have disapproved of their nephew marrying a non-yankee tradeswoman, much less a Jewess.(2)

The couple moved to Sonia's stately flat in Brooklyn, but things began to go horribly wrong for them right from the start. Sonia's hat shop went bankrupt, and her own health began to fail, necessitating her stay in a succession of rest homes. Lovecraft was still unemployed, and was unable to find a regular job. The income he made from freelance revision and ghostwriting was hardly impressive.

He also found New York to be rather antithetical to his nature. Lovecraft had spent the vast majority of his life in an insular and very white small town in New England, and to be standing in the home of the melting pot didn't sit very well with him at all. In the story "He," written in 1925, Lovecraft uses the noxious descriptions of sub-human immigrants to add to the atmosphere.

At the start of 1925 Sonia found another job in Cleveland, and was only able to come back to New York every once in a while. Lovecraft took a small apartment in a rather troublesome part of Brooklyn Heights, and found himself beset by mice and less than charming neighbors. He also suffered a visit from a burglar who stole nearly all his hats and coats. And although he had many friends in the city -- mostly fellow writers -- he was becoming more and more depressed.

In early 1926 Lovecraft's aunts invited him to come back to Providence and live with them. He accepted the offer, but doing so paved the way for the dissolution of his marriage. His aunts very firmly stated that they weren't about to have Sonia opening a shop in Providence. Most likely they were afraid of how their family name would suffer to have their nephew married to a tradeswoman, but the fact that Sonia was not a well-landed, Yankee Wasp may have had an unsaid hand in it as well.(3) For his part, Lovecraft seems to have allowed his aunts to make his decisions for him at this point: a separation from Sonia was filed, and this was eventually followed by a divorce in 1929.

Despite the failure of his marriage, Lovecraft was overjoyed to be back home. Between 1926 and 1927 he wrote more fiction than he ever had before, or would since. This time saw "The Call of Cthulhu," The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and "The Color out of Space," which was Lovecraft's favorite story.

Sadly, Weird Tales had changed editors, and the new one was hardly predisposed towards Lovecraft's work: it was a case of an editor who demanded commercial salability versus a writer who couldn't have cared a whit as to whether the story was commercial or not. At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time were soundly rejected by the new regime, and were eventually printed by Astounding Stories; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward did not see print until after Lovecraft's death.

This was, however, the time when a great deal of his professionally-published revision work was done: some of it was, in fact, all but ghostwriting for other writers. Ironically enough, these stories -- which were at least 90 percent Lovecraft's writing -- were readily accepted by Weird Tales, even though Lovecraft's own, signature work continued to meet with rejection. The change of fortunes was crushing to Lovecraft, and he began refusing to submit what he wrote for himself for fear of yet another rejection slip.

And so, the last ten years of his life were spent in near-obscurity. He wrote very few stories, though many of these are longer pieces that are considered his "classics," such as The Shadow over Innsmouth. He traveled quite a bit up and down the eastern seaboard, and made and maintained friendships by mail with a number of other horror and science fiction writers: August Derleth, Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch among them.

In the end, Lovecraft's poor diet may have killed him. He contracted cancer of the intestine, perhaps as early as 1934, and although the pain left him rather feeble in his last year of life he refused to see a doctor. When he finally did go in, it was too late to do anything but give him drugs for the pain. He died five days later, on March 15th, 1937.

(1) There seems to be some confusion over when H.P. Lovecraft started these publications. The Biographical essay in Call of Cthulhu: 5th Edition says these were founded in 1899, while the Introduction to The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft states that he did these while attending High School from 1904 to 1908 (sitting the 1905-06 year out due to a breakdown).

(2)The suspicions of anti-Jewish sentiment are, I must admit, my own. I find it hard to believe that Mr. Lovecraft's aunts were fairly open minded in such matters, but until I can get more information regarding this it can only remain idle speculation.

(3)See above.

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Sources

Joshi, S.T., The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, Dell Publishing, New York, NY: 1997.

Petersen, Sandy and Lynn Willis, Call of Cthulhu, Ed. 5.1.1, Chaosium Inc, Oakland, CA: 1992.