Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), known as H. P. Lovecraft, was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.
Although he seems to have had some social life, attending meetings of a club for local young men, Lovecraft, in early adulthood, was established in a reclusive “nightbird” lifestyle without occupation or pursuit of romantic adventures. In 1913 his conduct of a long running controversy in the letters page of a story magazine led to his being invited to participate in an amateur journalism association. Encouraged, he started circulating his stories; he was 31 at the time of his first publication in a professional magazine. Lovecraft contracted a marriage to an older woman he had met at an association conference. By age 34, he was a regular contributor to the newly founded Weird Tales magazine; he turned down an offer of the editorship.
Lovecraft returned to Providence from New York in 1926 and, over the next nine months, he produced some of his most celebrated tales, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, Lovecraft saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46.
| H. P. Lovecraft | |
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Lovecraft in 1934
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| Born | Howard Phillips Lovecraft August 20, 1890 Providence, Rhode Island, USA |
| Died | March 15, 1937 (aged 46) Providence, Rhode Island |
| Resting place | Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island |
| Pen name | Lewis Theobald Humphrey Littlewit Ward Phillips Edward Softly |
| Occupation | Short-story writer, editor, novelist, poet |
| Period | 1917–1937 |
| Genre | Dark, Fantasy, Gothic, Horror, Science fiction, Weird |
| Literary movement | Cosmicism |
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| Spouse | Sonia Greene (1924–1926) |
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