(photograph of Lovecraft in his twenties)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents had rented lodgings in Dorchester, Massachusetts, so that his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, could be nearer to his business interests in Boston, but shortly before Howard's birth, his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips, temporarily moved back home so that her sisters could care for her during her travail and recovery. Providence, with its rich history and quaint architecture, became the central reality of Lovecraft's existence.

When Lovecraft was two years old, his father went violently insane with syphilis and was placed in a madhouse. His mother returned permanently to Providence to live in the house of her parents, a three-story clapboard mansion on Angell Street, the street where Lovecraft continued to reside for thirty-one years of his brief life. The bouts of madness afflicted his father for the next six years. He was sometimes present and other times absent from the family scene. Admitted to Butler Hospital in Providence for "general paresis of the insane," another name for syphilis, he died in 1898.

Brilliantly precocious, Lovecraft learned to read at age three, and to write at age four. He occupied much of his early years devouring the large private library of his grandfather. Two of the earliest works he read were Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Arabian Nights. Under the influence of the latter work, when five years old he began to dress up like an Arab and made his mother decorate part of his room with oriental hangings and incense burners. An older relative suggested that he call himself Abdul Alhazred. Lovecraft followed this advice. Later in life, he would use this fanciful name for the author of his apocryphal work, The Necronomicon.

He especially delighted in the weird gothic novels of such writers as Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis. Throughout his adult life he exhibited a strong affectation for the speech and fashions of the 18th century, so much so that it might almost be considered a mania. He even adopted "ye olde" Queen Anne style of writing and speaking.

Lovecraft's mother was hopelessly neurotic. She had an intense aversion to being touched physically by others, and this dislike extended to her own son. Later in life Lovecraft described his mother as a "touch-me-not." She had always wanted a girl, and by way of compensation dressed the young Lovecraft up in girl's clothing and curled his hair like a girl. She encouraged him to declare to everyone he met "I'm a little girl." His protests finally put an end to this when he was six. She was by turns over-protective of her son and overly indulgent. He ate what he pleased and stayed up all night, yet she would not allow him to ride his tricycle without running along at his side with her hand on his shoulder. To a lesser degree his two aunts contributed similar behavior during his formative years.

Susie Phillips Lovecraft was weak-willed and suffered from migraine headaches, an affliction she passed down to Lovecraft. But that was not her worst legacy. She often told those she met that her son was "ugly" while Lovecraft could overhear the comment. Perhaps this was her reasoning for Lovecraft's natural love of solitude. She asserted to a neighbor that her son was "so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the street where people could gaze at him" (L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography, page 27). The sense that he was somehow unattractive or malformed, coupled with a discomfort about physical contact and sex, haunted Lovecraft's personal life as an adult. He once seriously asked his future wife, "How can any woman love a face like mine?" Worries about lack of money eventually broke down his mother's mental and physical health, but not before she did irreparable harm to her son's psyche.

Young Lovecraft suffered from nervous tics and involuntary grimaces. He was completely unable to abide crowded places, loud noises or strong odors. In addition to all his other complaints, he suffered nightly from terrifying nightmares that made him avoid sleep as long as he was able to stay awake. This may account in part for his childhood habit of staying up most of the night and sleeping late into the morning.

"When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me 'Night-Gaunts' -- I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up by the stomach and carry me off through infinite leagues of black air over the towers of dead and horrible cities. They would finally get me into a grey void where I could see the needle-like pinnacles of enormous mountains miles below. Then they would let me drop -- and as I gained momentum in my Icarus-like plunge I would start awake in such a panic that I hated to think of sleeping again" (Ibid.).

At 8 years old Lovecraft read the works of Edgar Allen Poe. This confirmed in him his lifelong passion for the strange and terrifying in literature. He also studied in books the physiological aspects of human sexuality, and decided that the whole mechanical business bored and rather disgusted him.

At age 9 he suffered a minor nervous breakdown and had to be taken out of school. For three years he was taught at home by his family and by hired tutors. Concerning his health as a child, he would later write:

"...my hypersensitive nerves reacted on my bodily functions to such a degree as to give the appearance of many different physical illnesses. Thus I had a very irregular heart action -- badly affected by physical exertion -- and such acute kidney trouble that a local practitioner would have operated for stone in the bladder had not a Boston specialist given a sounder diagnosis and traced it to the nervous system... Then, too, I had frightful digestive trouble -- all, probably, caused by malfunctioning nerves -- besides atrocious sick-headaches that kept me flat 3 or 4 days out of every week" (Ibid., page 30).

Today, we would probably diagnose most of Lovecraft's complaints as the result of stress brought on by the irrational demands of his mother and his failed attempts to live up to her warped expectations. Throughout his life his health was delicate, but there is no obvious cause for this weakness. Some have speculated that he contracted syphilis from his mother at his birth, and endured the slow, wasting effects of this horrible disease throughout his life. There is no clear evidence that either Lovecraft or his mother had syphilis.

In the fall of 1902, at age twelve, his health was improved enough to resume his formal schooling. School life was difficult for such an alien being. He was bullied, taunted, and regularly beaten by his classmates, who gave him the hated nickname "Lovey." This sort of abuse continued for another five years. In spite of it, Lovecraft was not a complete outcast. He possessed a naturally affable personality that caused others to like him immediately. He formed several close boyhood friendships.

Lovecraft's grandfather Whipple Phillips died in 1904. He had served as a substitute father figure, and had instilled in the boy a love of astronomy and weird stories. In his will, Lovecraft received a sum of $2500 dollars and the old man's collection of guns. Since Lovecraft's uncle, Edwin, had suffered a falling out with his father in 1894 and had left the family home, the old man has functioned as Lovecraft's only male role model. The boy was left to endure the attentive and neurotic fussing of his mother and two aunts.

Financial constraints compelled his mother and her sisters to sell the family mansion and move to a rented flat three blocks east on Angell Street. It must have been some consolation to remain on the same street, and in the same relatively affluent section of Providence. Even so, Lovecraft hated it with a passion and fantasized about committing suicide before he was forced to attend high school in the fall. He used to ride down to Barrington River and stop beside a certain reedy backwater and think about wading out into the warm water to lie face down until oblivion claimed him.

Much to his surprise, he made the discovery of many sensitive, intellectual children who had gone before him -- that high school was slightly less of a nightmare than grade school. He did well, but not spectacularly well, averaging 81 points, and found that he enjoyed learning about scientific subjects such as physics.

He had been writing fiction since the age of 5, but at 14 he tried his hand at more serious tales and discovered that he had a natural aptitude for creative writing. His emotional health was still fragile, however. Before the end of the school term in 1905 he stopped attending, and did not go at all the following year. Later he would characterize this period as a "nervous breakdown."

The year 1906 saw Lovecraft's first published work -- a letter written to the Providence Journal denouncing the practice of astrology. Scientific American printed one of his letters in which he advocated a cooperative effort among astrological observatories to search for unknown planets outside the orbit of Neptune. Throughout his life Lovecraft was a passionate letter writer. The volume of his letters far exceeds the volume of his published or unpublished stories and essays. After he became a know professional author, he sometimes spent several days composing a letter of 20 or 30 pages to a complete stranger in response to comments or questions. The communication of letters formed the center of his personal life, which was physically reclusive.

He bought a used Remington typewriter and began to publish series of articles on the subject of astronomy in New England magazines. After his return to high school in the fall of 1906, his classmates stopped calling him "Lovey" and began to call him "Professor," which Lovecraft preferred. The tone of these early efforts was scientific and skeptical. At age 5 Lovecraft had independently decided that there was no Santa Claus, and by analogy, that there was also no God. He was fascinated by the atmosphere and romance of the supernatural, but placed no credence in it whatsoever.

Little is know about his life during his late teens. Lovecraft had planned upon attending Brown University after graduation from high school, but in the fall of 1907 he took only a reduced course load at school, and did not return the following year, apparently because of health reasons. He later wrote in a letter about this period: "My health did not permit me to go to the university -- indeed, the steady application to high-school gave me a sort of breakdown" (Ibid., page 52). For five years he remained at home, sat around the house in his dressing gown, seldom went out and then usually at night, talked to almost no one other than his mother, studied, thought and wrote.

It was not a bad preparation for a writer, but to the more prosaic minds in Lovecraft's orbit, it seemed completely incomprehensible. He was looked upon as at best a recluse, at worst a madman, by his neighbors. A woman who lived near him later wrote: "As a little girl I was scared to death of him, for he used to walk rapidly up and down Angell Street at night just as a group of us were playing Hare and Hounds at the corner of Angell and Paterson Streets. His appearance always frightened me. He was certainly the neighborhood mystery. He would never speak to any of us, but kept right on with his head down" (Ibid., page 60).

To pass the time he studies chemistry and drawing, and collected stamps. He lived what he imagined to be the life of a reclusive and solvent English gentleman of the previous century, doing whatever struck his fancy to stave off boredom. He was completely unsuited for work, both psychologically and physiologically. He would not have considered employment at a job that he viewed as beneath his social station in life, no matter what the salary. Thanks to the support of his mother and aunts, he was able to sustain this fantasy world.

A few words must be written about Lovecraft's social attitude. By his individual human nature he was affable, respectful of others, and decent. But by social upbringing he was an elitist prig and a bigot. Throughout his life he voiced his hatred and contempt for the "non-white races" that he considered little better than animals. He kept as a pet a black cat named Nigger-Man. He embraced the theory of a superior Aryan race, from which his ancestors had descended, and despised all ethnics and immigrants, calling them "twisted ratlike vermin from the ghetto" and other things less flattering. He had a superior contempt for the working class and for any political policy that hinted at socialism, preferring to rely upon natural selection and the survival of the fittest to weed out the unworthy of humanity and send them to their rightful places at the bottom of the human pyramid. He coupled to these views a fanatical love for everything English, writing that as a young man he had favored the English cause during the American Civil War, and had preferred to sing "God Save the King" rather than "America."

It is far too easy to dismiss Lovecraft as a racist. It must be remembered that in his day, and particularly among his social equals in New England, such views were not considered extreme but enlightened and scientific. The white race was believed to be the superior race, and the English were thought to be the best breed of whites. Many other writers of the 20s and 30s, such as Robert E. Howard, the creator of the Celtic superman Conan the Barbarian, shared Lovecraft's opinions about the superiority of white Northern Europeans. It took the horrors of the Nazi death camps during Second World War to discredit the myth of the Aryan Superman.

Lovecraft began to read story magazines such as The Argosy and The Cavalier, the precursors to the later pulp mags devoted specifically to science fiction and horror. He was influenced by the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, although later in life he dismissed them as "cheap pulp stuff."

In 1913 Lovecraft once again began to write letters to newspapers and magazines, including the story magazines he read for his own entertainment. He sent a 1300 word letter to The Argosy denouncing the style of one of its most successful authors as decadent. This brought a spate of indignant replies from readers. In January of 1914 the Providence Evening News began to publish his monthly astronomy column. This ran continuously throughout the First World War. A similar series ran in 1915 in the Gazette-News of Asheville, North Carolina.

Lovecraft also contributed essays, poems and literary criticisms to numerous amateur magazines under various pseudonyms such as August T. Swift and Humphrey Littlewit. It is very unlikely that he was paid for any of these writings -- the idea of writing for money, let alone writing to earn a living wage, had not yet occurred to him in any personal sense. He was a gentleman, and in his view gentlemen did not write for money.

Not content merely to contribute to the periodicals of other amateurs, Lovecraft began to publish his own amateur literary paper, The Conservative, in April of 1915. He continued to bring out new issues for eight years. In its pages he was able to indulge his passion for criticizing the modern style of writing, and to promote his views of Aryan racial superiority. In the first issue appears the following:

"That the maintenance of civilization rests today with that magnificent Teutonic stock which is represented alike by the two hotly contending rivals [in the First World War], England and Germany, as well as by Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, is as undeniably true as it is vigorously disputed. The Teuton is the summit of evolution.... Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy" (Ibid., page 89).

In 1916 Lovecraft suffered yet another of his periodic nervous breakdowns, but it appears to have been of relatively short duration. In January of the following year he won $25 dollars in a contest for a movie criticism he wrote of "The Image-Maker of Thebes." He published his own paper four times a year during this period. It provided an outlet for the literary efforts of his growing circle of amateur writer friends.

As a favor to his literary friends, in 1918 he began to edit and rewrite their stories. He even began to accept payment for his efforts. This was his first serious professional income. Throughout the remainder of his life, he spent much of his time toiling away over the ideas or clumsy compositions of other writers much less talented than himself in an effort to make their works at least marginally fit to print. Sprague de Camp estimates that three-quarters of his income was derived from ghost-writing. As tedious as the work must have been, Lovecraft had a natural talent for it.

It was around this time that Lovecraft first attempted to write serious prose fiction on supernatural themes. Prior to this he had considered it too difficult a task for his abilities. "I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility" (Ibid., page 125). One of his earliest efforts, The Tomb, was not published until 1922, some years after its composition. Dagon, written after The Tomb, was published in 1919. Lovecraft received no money for either work.

The health of Lovecraft's mother was in steady decline. In March of 1919 she was admitted to Butler Hospital for the Insane, the same institution in which his father had died. She remained there two years until her death. Her absence took a terrible toll on Lovecraft's nerves. He often visited her in the grounds of the hospital, but could never bring himself to actually enter the building. His aunts continued to maintain the flat.

The year his mother entered the insane asylum, Lovecraft discovered the writings of Lord Dunsany. He was able to attend a lecture this English writer gave at the Copley-Plaza Hotel in Boston in November, and it exerted a profound influence over his imagination. Dunsany became an even greater influence on Lovecraft's style than Poe. He was a handsome and cultured man, a British aristocrat, who wrote tales of imaginary worlds peopled by exotic races and strange gods. Lovecraft greatly admired Dunsany's flowery and elaborate prose style, which today is almost unreadable.

Lovecraft composed the prose poem Nyarlathotep in 1920. It is significant in that it marks the earliest beginning of what would later be known as his Cthulhu mythos, in the sense that this name later became the name of one of the Great Old Ones. Like so many of his stories and poems, it was inspired by a dream. That year was highly productive for our author. His works are colored by the Dunsany prose style, but try as he would, Lovecraft could never write prose quite so badly as Dunsany. His innumerable private letters to distant literary friends, and his grinding work as a ghost-writer, had by brute force instilled in him a certain clarity of expression that no amount of deliberate affectation could destroy.

The following year saw one of Lovecraft's best stories, The Music of Erich Zann, as well as The Nameless City, which de Camp terms "the first of what would later be called the Cthulhu Mythos group."

At this time, Lovecraft maintained a correspondence with a woman named Sonia Greene, whom he had met at a literary convention in Boston. Sonia was some seven years older than Lovecraft. Born into the Jewish family of Shifirkin in the Ukraine in 1883, she had immigrated with her mother to New York, and at age sixteen had married a Jewish salesman named Greene. She bore him two children before divorcing him. Her son died in infancy, but her daughter was a teenager when Sonia met Lovecraft. Mother and daughter did not get along and generally avoided each other.

It seems that there is hardly a more unlikely woman in the world for Lovecraft to fall in love with and marry, but this is what eventually took place. She is described by those who met her as "a woman of great charm and personal magnetism," and "genuinely glamorous with powerful feminine allure." She was intelligent, witty, self-reliant, bold and charming. Her surviving photograph proves that she was beautiful. Lovecraft traveled to New York in 1922, the farthest he had ever ventured away from his home, and stayed at Sonia's apartment at her invitation, while she went to live with a neighbor for the sake of propriety.

The next year he met Sonia at Magnolia, Massachusetts, where she was staying on business. They went walking in the moonlight. At Lovecraft's insistence, Sonia tried her hand at supernatural fiction. She was so pleased with Lovecraft's effusive praise of her effort the following day that she impulsively kissed him on the lips. It perhaps goes without saying that Lovecraft did not kiss her back. Instead, he trembled and turned as white as a sheet. When she asked what was wrong, he confessed to her that he had not been kissed since infancy.

With some editorial work on Lovecraft's part, Sonia's tale was published in Weird Tales in the November 1923 issue under the title The Invisible Monster. Lovecraft himself was getting his fiction printed regularly in this and other pulp magazines -- of the eleven issues of Weird Tales published between October of 1923 and February of 1925, his work appeared in nine issues.

The early 20s were the most productive and most liberated years of Lovecraft's life. In July of 1922 he visited fellow writers in Cleveland, Ohio, where he stayed two weeks. On his return home he stopped to see Sonia in New York. She baked an apple pie for him to carry back to Providence for his aunts, and asked Lovecraft to urge them to visit her. One of his aunts did so in October, probably to size up Sonia as a prospective in-law.

Throughout 1923 Sonia courted Lovecraft aggressively. In the spring of the following year they decided to get married. Lovecraft was persuaded to move to New York to live.

He was hired to ghost-write a column for the escape artist Harry Houdini that would appear in Weird Tales. He also wrote a story that would bear Houdini's signature based on an idea by Houdini, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, in which the escape artist is captured by a gang of Arabs and lowered into an Egyptian tomb. This was the beginning of a sincere friendship between Houdini and Lovecraft that lasted until Houdini's death in 1926.

Lovecraft took a draft of his Houdini story with him to New York when he went there to marry Sonia in March of 1924. They were married at St. Paul's Chapel, presumably with a strictly Christian ceremony -- Lovecraft was a converted Episcopalian.

Sonia was forced to take the initiative on their wedding night, as she was throughout their relationship. She confided to August Derleth in 1953: "Howard was entirely adequate sexually, but he always approached sex as if he did not quite like it" (Ibid., page 194). Lovecraft's sexual inhibitions, the result of his strange and repressive upbringing, must have been almost overwhelming, and it is surprising that he was able to perform at all, even "adequately." Perhaps he thought of England during the act, and in this way was able to get through its unpleasantness.

Sonia was a businesswoman. She ran a millinery shop in Brooklyn in partnership with two other women. She was perfectly willing to support Lovecraft, but her business was failing. She talked him into moving into her apartment, on the premise that it would cost no more for two to live there than one. In an effort to improve her situation, she sold her share in the shop and bought a shop of her own, but this too failed to prosper. For his part, Lovecraft was dependent upon sums of money sent to him from his aunts. Even though these payments were part of his inheritance and rightfully his, they often failed to materialize.

Lovecraft was happy living in New York with his wife, but he found the various ethnic groups he encountered in society difficult to tolerate, particularly Jews. When Sonia reminded him that she was herself Jewish, Lovecraft replied, somewhat illogically, that she was now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, and that was all that mattered.

For the first time in his life, Lovecraft put on weight. Always before he had been thin to the point of emaciation, but under the influence of Sonia's cooking he went from 140 to 200 pounds. They bought two lots in Yonkers, planning to build a house on the larger lot when their finances improved.

There appeared to be some prospect that Lovecraft would actually be able to earn a living for the first time in his life. In 1924 the publisher of Weird Tales made inquiries to Lovecraft about his becoming editor of the magazine. Lovecraft refused to give a firm answer. Later in the same year Lovecraft was promised the editorship of a projected new magazine to be named Ghost Stories, at a salary that was to begin at $40 a week, and be raised to $100. This magazine never reached the presses. Lovecraft was able to secure a job with a collection agency in July, and actually went through their training course, but resigned without doing a day of work when he realized what the job entailed. Most of the money he earned while living with Sonia in Brooklyn was made by ghost-writing for others. In 1924 he wrote only one story, The Shunned House. The new editor of Weird Tales rejected it because of its slow start, but Lovecraft stubbornly refused to rewrite it. The story was not published for almost two decades.

Toward the end of the year Sonia had a nervous breakdown brought on by financial worries, and went to convalesce alone at a farm in New Jersey. Lovecraft visited her in November, and they decided to move to a less expensive apartment. Sonia was offered a job in a department store in Cincinnati, which she felt she could not refuse in view of her situation. She begged Lovecraft to come with her but he refused. This was effectively the beginning of the end of his short marriage, although they did not separate at this time. He moved to a studio apartment in Brooklyn that was large enough to hold the old family furniture he had transported from Providence, and Sonia left for her new position in Cincinnati.

The department store job did not work out, and Sonia tried again, this time in Cleveland. Again, Lovecraft refused to go with her. Lovecraft was feeling suicidal and longed to return to Providence. It did not help his emotional state when in May of 1925 he was robbed of almost all his clothes. He lost the weight he had gained during the early months of his marriage. There was no heat in his mouse-infested room, and when the electric light failed his landlady refused to repair it. Lovecraft sat shivering in the dark and dreaming of his childhood home, until Sonia hired an electrician to fix the light. But the worst feature of his new apartment for Lovecraft was the discovery that he had an unseen Syrian for a neighbor. Lovecraft could hear the man through the walls as he played "eldritch and whining monotones on a strange bagpipe." He wrote: "In truth, I never saw with actual sight the majority of my fellow-lodgers. I only heard them loathsomely -- and sometimes glimpsed faces of sinister decadence in the hall" (Ibid., page 234).

In 1925 Lovecraft wrote three short stories and his essay, Supernatural Horror In Literature, reprinted in 1973 by Dover Publications. This is a readable work of just under 100 pages that took Lovecraft eight months to write. True to his nature, he gave it away for free to an amateur journal.

Lovecraft became so unhappy with his lonely existence in New York, he took to carrying a bottle of poison around in his pocket everywhere he went. He longed to go back to Providence but could not bear to simply appear on his aunts' doorstep with his hat in his hand, when his married life had begun with so much promise. When he learned that half of a double house on Barnes Street in Providence was available at a reasonable rent, he leapt at the chance to get out of the city he had learned to loath. Sonia, who was working in Cleveland at the time, returned to Brooklyn and supervised her hapless husband's packing and moving. On April 17, 1926, he returned home alone.

A month or so later, Sonia arrived in Providence with the intention of staying permanently. She and Lovecraft found a large house, which they proposed to share with Lovecraft's aunts. Sonia declared to the two other women that she would bear all the expenses and find a good maid to care for the house, leaving the aunts free of worry. Imagine her surprise when they gently informed her that "neither they nor Howard could afford to have Howard's wife work for a living in Providence" (Ibid., page 262). That was the end of the big house. It seems that the aunts were willing to allow Sonia to support their nephew in distant New York, but had no intention of living on the charity of a working-class Jewess in their native town. Since Sonia could not rely upon Lovecraft or his aunts for support, and was not to be allowed to work to support them, she returned to New York. The marriage was effectively over, but she and Lovecraft did not actually divorce until 1929.

Sonia Greene was a gentle miracle in Lovecraft's distorted, lonely life, one that he had no reason to expect, and no wit to appreciate. There cannot be a more damning fact in his personal history than his failure to cherish this remarkable and beautiful woman who offered him everything, and asked for nothing except his love. This he was constitutionally unable to give. In all their time together, he never once told her that he loved her.

Once again breathing the air of his native Providence, Lovecraft's creative juices revived. Between September of 1926 and July of 1927 he wrote six stories, among them The Call of Cthulhu.

Although he never used the term "Cthulhu Mythos" himself to describe his story cycle, Lovecraft once observed of his fiction:

"All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again."

The aliens of Lovecraft's tales divide into two groups. There are the benign and detached Elder Gods who dwell in peace in the region of space near the star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. They have little interest in the earth and little to do with humanity. Then there are the Great Old Ones, also known as the Ancient Ones, who are evil and who seek to regain their lost control of the earth from mankind. Among these evil deities is Azatoth, the blind idiot god who is their leader; Yog-Sothoth the all-in-one and one-in-all who can transcend the laws of time and space; Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Ancient Ones; Cthulhu who dwells deep beneath the sea in hidden R'lyeh; Hastur the Unspeakable who lives in the interstellar spaces; Shub-Niggureth, the black goat with a thousand young; Hypnos, the god of dreams; and Dagon, ruler of the Deep Ones in the ocean depths.

Through the use of black magic, gateways can be opened between dimensions that allow the Great Old Ones to exert their influence upon the earth, and even to return into our time and space. Lovecraft mentioned a number of occult grimoires in this context, some real and some fictitious. Chief among these books is the dreaded Necronomicon written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Although this book was wholly Lovecraft's invention, numerous versions of it have surfaced over the past decade or so, all bogus. This point must be emphasized since there are a distressing number of individuals who believe that the Necronomicon actually existed as an historical text.

According to August Derleth, who began to correspond with Lovecraft in July of 1926, and after his death became his literary executor, the central tales of the Cthulhu Mythos consist of thirteen stories: The Nameless City (1921), The Festival (1923), The Call of Cthulhu (1926), The Color Out of Space (1927), The Dunwich Horror (1928), The Whisperer In Darkness (1930), The Dreams in the Witch-House (1932), The Haunter of the Dark (1935), The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931), The Shadow Out of Time (1934), At the Mountains of Madness (1931), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927-28), and The Thing On the Doorstep (1933). The dates of these stories are those given by Lovecraft himself in his chronology (see The Tomb and Other Tales. New York: Ballantine, 1970, pages 189-190), but the order of the tales is that provided by Derleth (see Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Volume One. New York: Ballantine, 1971, pages x-xi of Derleth's essay The Cthulhu Mythos).

In January of 1927 he completed in rough draft the novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath which was never to be published during his lifetime. It represents the crowning achievement of the second of his composite creations. The first is, of course, the Cthulhu cycle of tales; the second is the dream cycle. In the latter, dream landscapes are treated as alternative dimensions that human beings can visit during their sleep. Some men, such as Lovecraft's protagonist Randolph Carter, have the rare ability to remain completely conscious and aware during dreams, and can even enter specific dream dimensions at will. They are explorers and adventurers in the dream worlds.

That same year the editor of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright, planned with Lovecraft to publish an anthology collection of his fiction, but the failure of a similar venture with another author discouraged Wright from the attempt. No collected edition of Lovecraft's stories appeared during his lifetime.

Lovecraft's residence in New York, and his acquaintance with numerous other pulp writers, ended forever his reclusive life. Frequently friends came to Providence to visit, and Lovecraft seems to have completely overcome his early aversion to travel. Apart from the failure of his marriage and his lack of a dependable income, his life during this period was relatively content. He enjoyed taking his visitors on midnight tours of Providence, with a special stop at the graveyard.

In December of 1927 Sonia came to Providence in an attempt to revive her marriage. Lovecraft went to visit her in New York in the spring of the following year and stayed for several months, but flatly refused to have sexual relations with her. We can only imagine what this did to her pride. Lovecraft was growing increasingly callous toward his wife's feelings. He wrote to a friend that he had accompanied her to New York only to avoid the ugliness of a domestic dispute in Providence. "Nothing but strong domestic pressure could ever have induced me to waste a spring in this accursed metropolitan pest-zone..." (de Camp, page 296).

Spring and summer of 1928 were spent pleasantly visiting friends in various parts of New England. Later that year, after returning to Providence, he wrote The Dunwich Horror, one of the key tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Weird Tales bought the story for $240, the largest sum Lovecraft had ever received for any of his works. True to form, Lovecraft stopped writing for a year and a half. He seems to have been unable to resist destroying any possibility of success whenever there was the least prospect of it in his life.

Instead of writing stories of his own, he continued to labor ghosting for other less-talented authors. To a very large extent, any merit these works possess belongs to Lovecraft, but he was neither recognized for his literary contributions nor compensated adequately in a financial sense. He never learned to be a businessman, and consequently the other writers whose stories and essays he beat into shape paid him only a fraction of what they eventually received for his work.

After his divorce from Sonia, Lovecraft remained on cordial terms with his ex-wife until 1933, when she took ship for California. Before leaving New York, she burned a trunk of Lovecraft's letters to her, symbolically severing her link with him forever. In 1935 she married a Brazilian Jew in California, and lived happily with him for seven years until his death from cancer. She died in 1972 at the age of 89.

There is little to record about Lovecraft's life in the years following his divorce. He continued to live in Providence, to travel on visits to his friends, to write his infrequent stories, and to maintain his voluminous correspondence with readers. August Derleth became a more or less constant factor in his life. The younger man fastened onto Lovecraft like a leech -- perhaps he recognized even then that Lovecraft was his future meal-ticket. Years later when Derleth founded his own publishing house, he named it after one of Lovecraft's fictional locations -- Arkham. Reprints of Lovecraft's works kept Arkham House in business long after it would have folded without the selling-power of his name. Arkham House is still making money from Lovecraft's memory, and putting it into the pockets of people Lovecraft never knew.

In 1933 Lovecraft was again pinched by poverty. He moved with one of his aunts into the less expensive rented upper floor of a colonial house on College Street that was owned and maintained by Brown University. Lovecraft loved the architecture and history of the old house.

He became a Fascist sympathizer and began to rant once again in letters to his friends against the Jews and other ethnic minorities. One of his friends observed: "Howard's monomania about race was about as close to insanity as anything I can think of" (Ibid., page 374). Hitler and Mussolini found favorable mention in his correspondence. He even had good things to write about Stalin. Concerning Hitler he wrote: "I know he's a clown, but by god I like the boy!"

Paradoxically, he also began to support the New Deal of Roosevelt, on the principle that Roosevelt was a gentleman, and therefore suited to instruct the ignorant masses in America about the error of their ways.

By 1935, the atrocities of the Fascists began to poke holes in Lovecraft's fantasy portrait of them, and he stopped sounding their praises. A neighbor visited Germany in 1936, and returned to tell Lovecraft exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Despite his intellectual prejudice against Jews, he had no actual hatred toward them, or toward any other racial group for that matter. Lovecraft was shocked, and began to actively discourage pro-Nazi sentiments when these were expressed among his circle of literary friends.

The publisher of a magazine called Unusual Stories, William L. Crawford, attempted to publish Lovecraft's long story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a book in 1936, but alas, when he had sold only 150 copies financial ruin forced him to give up publishing and go on the road selling subscriptions to the Farm Journal. This was as close as Lovecraft ever came during his lifetime to having his name on the cover of a book.

In 1936 Lovecraft suffered from a series of physical complaints, some of them no doubt brought on by the ill-health of his aunt. Any disruption in his household routine disrupted his physical well-being. One of the problems that plagued him was increasingly frequent constipation. This had begun to trouble him as early as 1935. It turned out that this was not a mere nervous disorder, but the result of a bowel cancer. He suffered for over two years without consulting a doctor about it. By then it was too late to treat. On March 10, 1937, he was admitted to the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. He was by that time completely unable to eat. He died on the morning of March 15, and was buried three days later in the family plot at Swan Point Cemetery.

Since his death, his fame as a writer has increased with each passing decade. The stories of Cthulhu and the other Ancient Ones have come to be regarded by some occultists as dream visions of some existing alternative reality. Other writers continue to add to the mythology created by Lovecraft, partially as a tribute to his memory and work, but mostly because the Cthulhu Mythos sells books. It contains numerous powerful mythic echoes recognized unconsciously by modern readers.

Was Lovecraft in some way in contact with another reality, which he was able to access through his dreams in much the same way that his fictional character, Randolph Carter, accessed Unknown Kadath? Lovecraft's life and beliefs were certainly strange enough to support such a speculation. Only the appearance of the Great Old Ones, or the discovery of an ancient copy of the Necronomicon, will prove this theory, and even were either of these events to occur, the world would close its eyes and refuse to believe.

Most of this little essay about Lovecraft is based on facts presented in the 1975 work H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography by L. Sprague de Camp, which was reissued by Barnes and Noble in 1996. It is a highly readable account of Lovecraft's life. I recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about this enigmatic writer of supernatural fiction.