Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s talent and his ability to detail the terrifying and the dreadful is sadly marked by his tragic life. Born to affluence in 1890, Lovecraft was the sole child of Winfield and Sarah Lovecraft. At the age of 3, his father experienced a psychotic episode and had been exhibiting strange behavior for a year prior. Winfield would be subsequently placed in Butler Hospital and would be diagnosed with syphilis. Winfield would live with this condition at the hospital for five years before passing away, he would never see his family again. Lovecraft would then live with his mother at her family’s home. This move would be a combination of the best and worst moments in his young life. At his new home, owned by the esteemed father of Sarah Lovecraft, Whipple Van Buren Phillips.
At the Phillips’ home, Lovecraft would be exposed to his grandfather’s library where he would read a vast collection of classical tales. He began reciting poetry at two, reading at 3 and writing at 6. Clearly, in his own right, Lovecraft was something approaching prodigy. Among the many volumes of literature at his fingertips, Lovecraft’s early favorite was Arabian Nights. From this story, Lovecraft drew his fictional author of the iconic and infamous Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred. H.P. was not the most social child, although this isn’t entirely his fault; he would suffer from several psychological issues in his youth. Lovecraft and his grandfather would, however, share a close relationship. The good times would not last sadly, when Whipple would pass away in 1904. Soon after, things in the Phillips household would begin to turn sour. The funds for the estate began to dry up due to mismanagement and the family appeared to fall into disarray. As a result, Lovecraft and his mother would move into a small apartment together. From there Lovecraft and his mother’s relationship became overbearing and overprotective. He wouldn’t be able to go out to school often for health reasons, but in high school he did have several friends, however, a nervous breakdown at the end of his senior year in high school would prevent his graduation and admission to Brown University. This would cast a long shadow over H.P.’s young life as this educational failure brought him to the brink of suicide. Luckily, his enthusiasm for learning and writing would pull him back from that dark abyss.
Lovecraft’s writing ability is believed to have begun as early as seven with his oldest surviving work being “The Poem of Ulysses” an 88-line paraphrase of the Odyssey in internally rhyming verse written in 1897. Yeah, he was seven years old when he wrote that! Lovecraft’s writing did not gain any traction or recognition until he began his campaign against the works of Fred Jackson, who wrote romances for a publication known as The Argosy. Lovecraft sent a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson’s writing ability to the publication. In the debates that followed between Lovecraft and Jackson’s admirers, Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), noticed the talent of Lovecraft’s writing and invited him to join the organization. Lovecraft would work and grow within the UAPA eventually becoming president and its head editor. Lovecraft would note how his work in the UAPA brought him joy and meaning, “In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be… With the advent of the United I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening world.”
Lovecraft’s happiness would not last long, sadly, as his mother would suffer a nervous breakdown in 1919 and be placed in the same hospital as his father, Butler Hospital. Tragically, Lovecraft’s mother would pass away from a botched gall bladder operation in 1921. This shattered Lovecraft and he would enter a deep depression for several weeks. Lovecraft was pulled out of his melancholy when he attended an amateur journalism convention in Boston where he met Sonia Haft Greene. The two would hit it off and become a couple. By 1924 the couple would be married and live in New York. At this time, Lovecraft had several of his fiction stories admitted into the pulp magazine Weird Tales and everything seemed to be going well for H.P. As would seem to become a theme, the happiness would not last for Lovecraft. Soon after the marriage, Lovecraft denied offered a job running a companion publication of Weird Tales in Chicago and Sonia’s hat business would go under not too long after that. Her health would also take a downward turn and she would be admitted to a New Jersey sanitarium. As Lovecraft searched for jobs fruitlessly, his wife, who had recovered from her illness, took up work in Cleveland.
In her absence and constant travel due to work, Lovecraft entered into a specific horror of his own marked by his impoverished lifestyle forcing him to live in the poorer areas of New York, expressing his experiences in the “The Horror at Red Hook” quoting, “My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration […] I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.” Lovecraft’s horror at red hook in New York grew to become more of a burden than he could handle exasperated by his xenophobia/racism. H.P. longed for the comfortable confines of home and decided to move in with his two aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Gamwell in Providence. Presumably angered by the not receiving an invitation to Lovecraft’s wedding, they granted Lovecraft board under one condition: Lovecraft was not to allow her to come and work in Providence. The marriage would dissolve thereafter. Despite the loss of his relationship with his wife, the period Lovecraft spent in Providence was the best in terms of his fiction writing. Over the span of nearly ten years Lovecraft would write, The Call of Cthulu, Pickman’s Model, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Dreams in the Witch-House. This is akin to breaking off major hits one after another, after another. Sadly, in the midst of his fiction writing explosion Lovecraft was once more struck with the macabre embrace of death. He would witness the death his aunt (Lillian Clark 1932) and his close friend Robert Howard who committed suicide in 1936.
Eventually, the grip of death would take hold upon Lovecraft too. His skeptical attitude towards doctors allowed his colon cancer to fester until his finally Lovecraft could take the pain no longer. He would be diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and pass away March 10th, 1937.
Lovecraft’s life was marked by the macabre which, in turn, inspired his stories. He would have been condemned to obscurity if it weren’t for the friendships he cultivated over his adult life. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei worked to preserve Lovecraft’s stories by opening up Arkham House publishing. Lovecraft’s writings would be translated into several languages and gain a tremendous amount of popularity in postwar France, have a resurgence of popularity in the States during the 70s and continue to inspire legendary writers, including Stephen King and the writers of Batman. Ever heard of Arkham Asylum? Yep that famous institution was inspired by the town created by Lovecraft, appearing in several of his stories.
The traumatic experiences from Lovecraft’s life filled his nightmares which fueled his writings. One telling component in Lovecraft’s stories is his xenophobia/racism. In his early adulthood as he tried to scrape by writing his stories and selling them to pulp publications, he lived in impoverished areas, laden with immigrants. This both terrified and in a way inspired Lovecraft.
