H.P. Lovecraft

• I was born at 9 a.m. on August 20, 1890, at my family home at 454 (then numbered 194) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. My mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry to the arrival of George Phillips to Massachusetts in 1630. My father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman for Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence. When I was three my father suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years before dying on July 19, 1898. I was informed that my father was paralyzed and comatose during this period, but the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case; it is nearly certain that my father died of paresis, a form of neurosyphilis.
• With the death of my father, my upbringing fell to my mother, my two aunts, and especially my grandfather, the prominent industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. I was a precocious youth: I was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven. My earliest enthusiasm was for the "Arabian Nights", which I read by the age of five; it was at this time that I adapted the pseudonym of “Abdul Alhazred,” who later became the author of the mythical Necronomicon. The next year, however, my Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek mythology, gleaned through Bulfinch’s "Age of Fable" and through children’s versions of "The Iliad" and "Odyssey". Indeed my earliest surviving literary work, “The Poem of Ulysses” (1897), is a paraphrase of the "Odyssey" in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. But I had by this time already discovered weird fiction, and my first story, the non-extant “The Noble Eavesdropper,” dates to as early as 1896. My interest in the weird was fostered by my grandfather, who entertained me with off-the-cuff weird tales in the Gothic mode.
• As a boy I was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. My attendance at the Slater Avenue School was sporadic, but I was soaking up much information through independent reading. At about the age of eight I discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. I began to produce hectographed journals, The Scientific Gazette (1899-1907) and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903-07), for distribution amongst my friends. When I entered Hope Street High School, I found both his teachers and peers congenial and encouraging, and I developed a number of long-lasting friendships with boys of my age. My first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when I wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly thereafter I began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; I later wrote columns for The Providence Tribune (1906-08) and The Providence Evening News (1914-18), as well as The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News (1915).
• In 1904 the death of my grandfather, and the subsequent mismanagement of his property and affairs, plunged my family into severe financial difficulties. My mother and myself were forced to move out of our lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters at 598 Angell Street. I was devastated by the loss of my birthplace, and contemplated suicide, as I took long bicycle rides and looked wistfully at the watery depths of the Barrington River. But the thrill of learning banished those thoughts. In 1908, however, just prior to my graduation from high school, I suffered a nervous breakdown that compelled me to leave school without a diploma; this fact, and my consequent failure to enter Brown University, were sources of great shame to me in later years, in spite of the fact that I was one of the most formidable autodidacts of my time. From 1908 to 1913, I was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing my astronomical interests and my poetry writing. During this whole period I was thrown into an unhealthily close relationship with my mother, who was still suffering from the trauma of her husband’s illness and death, and who developed a pathological love-hate relationship with me.
• Eventually I emerged from my hermitry in a very peculiar way. Having taken to reading the early “pulp” magazines of the day, I became so incensed at the insipid love stories of one Fred Jackson in The Argosy that I wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson. This letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson’s defenders. I engaged in a heated debate in the letter column of The Argosy and its associated magazines, my responses being almost always in rollicking heroic couplets reminiscent of Dryden and Pope. This controversy was noted by Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from around the country who wrote and published their own magazines. Daas invited me to join the UAPA, and I did so in early 1914. I published thirteen issues of my own paper, The Conservative (1915-23), as well as contributing poetry and essays voluminously to other journals. I later became President and Official Editor of the UAPA, and also served briefly as President of the rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). This entire experience may well have saved me from a life of unproductive reclusiveness; as I once said: “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.”
• It was in the amateur world that I recommenced the writing of fiction, which I had abandoned in 1908. W. Paul Cook and others, noting the promise shown in such early tales as “The Beast in the Cave” (1905) and “The Alchemist” (1908), urged me to pick up my fictional pen again. This I did, writing “The Tomb” and “Dagon” in quick succession in the summer of 1917. Thereafter, I kept up a steady if sparse flow of fiction, although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still my dominant mode of literary expression. I also became involved in an ever-increasing network of correspondence with friends and associates, and I eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century. • My mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital, whence, like my father, she would never emerge. Her death on May 24, 1921, however was the result of a bungled gall bladder operation. I was shattered by the loss of my mother, but in a few weeks had recovered enough to attend an amateur journalism convention in Boston on July 4, 1921. It was on this occasion that I first met the woman who would become my wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian Jew seven years my senior, but we seemed, at least initially, to find ourselves very congenial. I visited Sonia in her Brooklyn apartment in 1922, and the news of our marriage on March 3, 1924, was not entirely a surprise to our friends; but it may have been to my two aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, who were notified only by letter after the ceremony had taken place. I moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the us seemed good: I had gained a foothold as a professional writer by the acceptance of several of my early stories by Weird Tales, the celebrated pulp magazine founded in 1923; Sonia had a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue in New York.
• But troubles descended upon us almost immediately: the hat shop went bankrupt, I turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to Weird Tales (which would have necessitated my move to Chicago), and Sonia’s health gave way, forcing her to spend time in a New Jersey sanitarium. I attempted to secure work, but few were willing to hire a thirty-four-year-old-man with no job experience. On January 1, 1925, Sonia went to Cleveland to take up a job there, and I moved into a single apartment near the seedy Brooklyn area called Red Hook.
• Although I had many friends in New York—Frank Belknap Long, Rheinhart Kleiner, Samuel Loveman—I became increasingly depressed by my isolation and the masses of “foreigners” in the city. My fiction turned from the nostalgic (“The Shunned House” (1924) is set in Providence) to the bleak and misanthropic (“The Horror at Red Hook” and “He” (both 1924) lay bare my feelings for New York). Finally, in early 1926, I made plans to return to the Providence I missed so keenly. But where did Sonia fit into these plans? No one seemed to know, least of all myself. Although I continued to profess my affection for her, I acquiesced when my aunts barred her from coming to Providence to start a business; their nephew could not be tainted by the stigma of a tradeswoman wife. Our marriage was essentially over, and a divorce in 1929 was inevitable.
• When I returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, settling at 10 Barnes Street north of Brown University, it was not to bury myself away as I had done in the 1908-13 period; rather, the last ten years of my life were the time of my greatest flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. My life was relatively uneventful—I traveled widely to various antiquarian sites around the eastern seaboard (Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine); I wrote my greatest fiction, from “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) to "At the Mountains of Madness" (1931) to “The Shadow Out Of Time” (1934-35); and I continued my prodigiously vast correspondence—but I had found my niche as a New England writer of weird fiction and as a general man of letters. I nurtured the careers of many young writers (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); I became concerned with political and economic issues, as the Great Depression led me to support Roosevelt and become a moderate socialist; and I continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture.
• The last two or three years of my life, however, were filled with hardship. In 1932 my beloved aunt, Mrs. Clark, died, and I moved into quarters at 66 College Street, right behind the John Hay Library, with my other aunt Mrs. Gamwell in 1933. (This house has now been moved to 65 Prospect Street.) My later stories, increasingly lengthy and complex, became difficult to sell, and I was forced to support himself largely through the “revision” or ghost-writing of stories, poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936 the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of my closest correspondents, left me confused and saddened. By this time the illness that would cause my death—cancer of the intestine—had already progressed so far that little could be done to treat it. I attempted to carry on in increasing pain through the winter of 1936-37, but was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on March 10, 1937, where I died five days later. I was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family plot at Swan Point Cemetery.
• It is likely that, as I saw death approaching, I envisioned the ultimate oblivion of my work: I had never had a true book published in my lifetime (aside, perhaps, from the crudely issued "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" [1936]), and my stories, essays, and poems were scattered in a bewildering number of amateur or pulp magazines. But the friendships that I had forged merely by correspondence held myself in good stead: August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were determined to preserve my stories in the dignity of a hardcover book, and formed the publishing firm of Arkham House initially to publish my work; they issued "The Outsider and Others" in 1939. Many other volumes followed from Arkham House, and eventually my work became available in paperback and was translated into a dozen languages. Today, at the centennial of my birth, my stories are available in textually corrected editions, my essays, poems, and letters are widely available, and many scholars have probed the depths and complexities of my work and thought. Much remains to be done in the study of my works, but it is safe to say that, thanks to the intrinsic merit of my own work and to the diligence of my associates and supporters, I have gained a small but unassailable niche in the canon of American and world literature.
• If I were still alive, I would thank you all...