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Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Born

August 20, 1890, Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Died

March 15, 1937 (aged 46) Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Occupation

short story writer; novelist

Genres

Horror, Science fiction, Fantasy

Literary movement Cosmicism

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 March 15, 1937) was an American author of
horror, fantasy and science fiction, known then simply as weird fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: the idea that life is
incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely
reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity.
Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely
interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a
fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.
His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of Enlightenment,
Romanticism, and Christian humanism.Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of
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traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Lovecrafts Early Life
Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 at 9:00 a.m. in his family home at 194 (later 454) Angell
Street in Providence, Rhode Island. (The house was torn down in 1961.) He was the only child of Winfield
Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft,
who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.
His parents married, the first marriage for both, when they were in their thirties, unusually late in
life given the time period. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a
Chicago hotel room while on a business trip.
He was brought back to Providence and placed in Butler Hospital, where he remained until his
death in 1898. Lovecraft maintained throughout his life that his father died in a condition of paralysis
brought on by "nervous exhaustion" due to over-work, but it is now almost certain that Winfield Scott
Lovecraft died from general paresis of the insane.
It is unknown whether Lovecraft was ever aware of the actual nature of his father's illness or its
cause (syphilis), although his mother likely was, possibly having even received tincture of arsenic as
"preventive medication".

Lovecraft at approximately age nine.

Lovecraft thereafter was raised by his mother, his two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie
Emeline Phillips), and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. All resided together in the family home.
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Lovecraft was a child prodigy, reciting poetry at the age of two and writing complete poems by six.

His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights,
Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
His grandfather also stirred the boy's interest in the weird by telling him his own original tales of
Gothic horror. His mother, on the other hand, worried that these stories would upset him.
Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child, at least some of which was certainly psychosomatic,
although he attributed his various ailments to physical causes only. Early speculation that he may have been
congenitally disabled by syphilis passed on from father to mother to fetus has been ruled out. Due to his
sickly condition and his undisciplined, argumentative nature he barely attended school until he was eight and
then was withdrawn after a year. He read voraciously during this period and became especially enamored of
chemistry and astronomy. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation
beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette. Four years later he returned to public school at Hope Street
High School.
His grandfather's death in 1904 greatly affected Lovecraft's life. Mismanagement of his
grandfather's estate left his family in such a poor financial situation they were forced to move into much
smaller accommodations at 598 (now a duplex at 598-600) Angell Street. Lovecraft was so deeply affected
by the loss of his home and birthplace he contemplated suicide for a time. In 1908, prior to his high school
graduation, he claimed to have himself suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and
consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did
graduate).
S. T. Joshi suggests in his biography of Lovecraft that a primary cause for this breakdown was his
difficulty in higher mathematics, a subject he needed to master to become a professional astronomer. This
failure to complete his education (he wished to study at Brown University) was a source of disappointment
and shame even late into his life.
Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but, from 1908 until 1913, his output was primarily poetry.
During this time, he lived a hermit's existence, having almost no contact with anyone but his mother. This
changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the
love stories of one of the publication's popular writers. The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column
caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the UAPA, who invited Lovecraft to join in 1914. The UAPA
reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays.
In 1917, at the prodding of correspondents, he returned to fiction with more polished stories such
as "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The latter was his first professionally published work, appearing in W. Paul
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Cook's The Vagrant (November, 1919) and Weird Tales in 1923. Around this time he began to build up a
huge network of correspondents.

In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother
had a nervous breakdown and was committed to Butler Hospital like her husband before her. Nevertheless,
she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained very close until her death on May 21, 1921, the
result of complications from gall bladder surgery. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss.
Lovecrafts Marriage and New York

Lovecraft and Sonia Greene

A few weeks after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in
Boston where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry and seven years
older than Lovecraft.
They married in 1924, and the couple moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
Lovecraft's aunts may have been unhappy with this arrangement, as they were not fond of Lovecraft being
married to a tradeswoman (Greene owned a hat shop).
Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties.
Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both so his
wife moved to Cleveland for employment.
Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely
dislike New York life.
A few years later he and Greene, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was
never fully completed. He returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years. Due to
the unhappiness of their marriage, some biographers have speculated that Lovecraft could have been
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asexual, though Greene is often quoted as referring to him as "an adequately excellent lover".
Back to Providence
Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes
Street until 1933. The period after his return to Providence the last decade of his life was Lovecraft's
most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading
pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large
amount of ghost-writing, including "The Mound," "Winged Death," "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," and
"The Diary of Alonzo Typer."
Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller
and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide. In
1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in
constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937 in Providence.

Grave of Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument. That was not
enough for his fans, so in 1977 a group of individuals raised the money to buy him a headstone of his
own, on which they had inscribed Lovecraft's name, the dates of his birth and death and the phrase, "I
AM PROVIDENCE," a line from one of his personal letters.
On October 13, 1997, unknown individual(s) attempted to dig up Lovecraft's body from his
grave, not knowing that his body is not under the new headstone.

A Short Background of Lovecrafts Work

H. P. Lovecrafts name is synonymous with horror fiction; his writing, particularly the Cthulhu
Mythos, has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements may be found in novels,
movies, music, comic books and cartoons.
Lovecraft himself, though, was relatively unknown during his own time. While his stories might
have made it into the pages of prominent pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (often eliciting letters of
outrage from regular readers of the magazines), not many people knew his name. He did, however,
correspond regularly with other contemporary writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth,
people who became good friends of his, even if they never met in person. This group of correspondents
became known as the Lovecraft Circle, since they all freely borrowed elements of Lovecrafts stories
the mysterious books with disturbing names, the pantheon of ancient alien gods such as Cthulhu and
Azathoth, and eldritch places such as the New England town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University
for use in their own (with Lovecrafts blessing and encouragement).
Lovecraft's fiction has been grouped into three categories by some critics. While Lovecraft did not
refer to these categories himself, he did once write, "There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces'
but alas where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

Macabre stories (approximately 19051920)

Dream Cycle stories (approximately 19201927)

Cthulhu Mythos/Lovecraft Mythos stories (approximately 19251935)

Much of Lovecraft's work was directly inspired by his night terrors, and it is perhaps this direct
insight into the unconscious and its symbolism that helps to account for their continuing resonance and
popularity.
Another inspiration came from a totally different kind of source; the scientific progresses at the time
in such wide areas as biology, astronomy, geology and physics, all contributed to make the human race seem
even more insignificant, powerless and doomed in a materialistic and mechanical universe, and was a major
contributor to the ideas that later would be known as cosmicism, and which gave further support to his
atheism.

Forbidden Knowledge
In "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is
the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated
knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age."
Lovecraft's protagonists are nevertheless always driven to this "piecing together," which makes up most
Lovecraft stories.
Gender
Women in Lovecraft's fiction are rare, and sympathetic women virtually non-existent; the few
leading female characters in his stories like Asenath Waite (though actually an evil male wizard who has
taken over an innocent girl's body) in "The Thing on the Doorstep" and Lavinia Whateley in "The Dunwich
Horror" are invariably servants of sinister forces. Romance is likewise almost absent from his stories;
where he touches on love, it is usually a platonic love (e.g. "The Tree"). His characters live in a world where
sexuality is negatively connotated if it is productive at all, it gives birth to less-than-human beings ("The
Dunwich Horror").

The Call of Cthulhu

"The Call of Cthulhu" is one of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in
the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928. It is the only story written by
Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance.
It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by
the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. The narrator pieces together
the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, illustrating the story's
first line: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of
infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

Plot Sumary
The story is presented as a manuscript "found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland
Thurston, of New York". In the text, Thurston recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his
grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died suddenly in "the winter of 192627" after being
"jostled by a nautical-looking negro".
"The Horror in Clay"
The first part of the story, "The Horror in Clay", concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found
among the papers, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings." The sculpture turns out to be the work of
Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based the work on his dreams
of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister
with latent horror." These images are associated in the dreams with the words Cthulhu and R'lyeh.
Wilcox's dreams began on March 1, 1925, culminating in a period from March 23 until April 2
when Wilcox was in a state of delirium. During the same period, Angell's research reveals, there were cases
of "outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world from Paris and
London, Africa and South America, Haiti and the Philippines, western Ireland and India. In New York City,
"hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dons white robes to await a
"glorious fulfillment."
"The Tale of Inspector Legrasse"
In the second part of the story, "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse", Angell's notes reveal
that the professor had heard the word Cthulhu and seen a similar image much earlier. At the 1908
meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police
official named John Raymond Legrasse had asked the assembled antiquarians to identify a statuette,
made of an unidentifiable greenish-black stone, that "had been captured some months before in the
wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting." The "idol,
fetish, or whatever it was" closely resembled the Wilcox bas-relief:
It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face
was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long,
narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a
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somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with
undecipherable characters.
On November 1, 1907, Legrasse had led a party in search of several women and children who
disappeared from a squatter community. The police found the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a
ritual that centered on the statuette, about which roughly 100 men all of a "very low, mixed-blooded, and
mentally aberrant type" were "braying, bellowing, and writhing", repeatedly chanting the phrase,
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogated the prisoners and
learned "the central idea of their loathsome faith":
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and
who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the
sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had
never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest
Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always
be waiting to liberate him.
The prisoners identified the statuette as "great Cthulhu", and translated the chanted phrase as "In his
house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." One particularly talkative cultist, known as "old Castro",
named the centre of the cult as Irem, the City of Pillars, in Arabia, and points out a relevant passage in the
Necronomicon:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
One of the academics queried by Legrasse, William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology
at Princeton, points out that he had encountered, "high up on the West Greenland coast", a similar
phenomenon on an 1860 expedition: "a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a
curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness." Webb said
that the Greenland cult had both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish.
Thurston, the narrator, notes that at this point in his investigation, "My attitude was still one
of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were."

The Madness from the Sea

In the third part of the story, "The Madness from the Sea", Thurston extends the inquiry into the
"Cthulhu Cult" beyond what Professor Angell had discovered. He discovers by chance an article from the
Sydney Bulletin, an Australian newspaper, for April 18, 1925, that reported the discovery of a derelict ship in
the Pacific Ocean with only one survivor Norwegian sailor Gustaf Johansen, second mate on the
schooner Emma out of Auckland, New Zealand, which on March 22 encountered a heavily armed yacht,
the Alert, crewed by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" from Dunedin, N.Z. After
the Alert attacked without provocation, the crew of the Emma fought back and, though losing their own ship,
managed to board the opposing ship and kill all their attackers.
The article went on to say that the survivors encountered an island the next day, in the vicinity of
47 9' S, 126 43' W, even though there are no charted islands in that area. Most of the remaining crew died
on the island, but Johansen is said to be "queerly reticent" about what happened to them.
Thurston realizes from the article that the crew of the Alert was connected to the Cthulhu Cult, and
travels, first to New Zealand, then to Australia (where he sees a statue retrieved from the Alert with a
"cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal") and finally to Oslo, where he learns
that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors".
When Johansen's widow gives Thurston a manuscript written in English that her husband
left behind, the narrator learns of the crew's discovery of the uncharted island which is described as
"a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less the
tangible substance of earth's supreme terror the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh." Exploring the
risen land, which is "abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours",the sailors manage to open a "monstrously carven portal", and from the newly
opened depths...It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green
immensity through the black doorway.... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had
failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years
great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Thurston (or Johansen) writes that "The Thing cannot be described", though the story does call it
"the green, sticky spawn of the stars", and refers to its "flabby claws" and "awful squid-head with writhing
feelers". Hinting at its scale, the story says, "A mountain walked or stumbled." Johansen manages to get back
to the yacht; when Cthulhu enters the water to pursue the ship, Johansen rams the creature's head, which
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bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish" only to immediately begin reforming as Johansen
and a sole companion (insane, and soon dead) make their escape.

After reading this manuscript, Thurston ends his own narrative on a pessimistic note:
"Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men."
He assumes that he will soon meet the fate of Angell and Johansen: "I know too much, and the cult
still lives." He also thinks that Cthulhu, whilst restoring his broken head, was dragged down again
with the sinking city, thus keeping humanity safe until the next time, when the stars are right.
Characters
George Gammell Angell
(1834November 23, 1926)
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University who was "widely known as an
authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums."
He died suddenly after being bumped by a black man (possibly a sailor) while returning from the Newport
boat. At the time of his death, at age 92, he was a childless widower. His research notes on the worldwide
Cthulhu cult were discovered after his death by his nephew, Francis Wayland Thurston.
Angell is an old Providence family name; Angell Street was Lovecraft's childhood address. He had
an uncle named Gamwell, whose name was pronounced with a silent W.
Francis Wayland Thurston
A Bostonian anthropologist, he was the grand-nephew of George Angell and the sole heir and
executor of his estate. While going through the late Professor Angell's papers, he discovered the secret of the
Cthulhu Cult, a revelation that probably sealed his doom.
Thurston is another old Providence name. Francis Wayland was the fourth president of Brown
University, who did much to build up the institution. Thurston's name appears only in the story's subtitle,
which originally appeared in Weird Tales but was dropped from later reprints until the 1981 Arkham House
edition.
Henry Anthony Wilcox
He is described, in terms that somewhat recall Lovecraft himself, as a
thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect.... The youngest son of an excellent family...who had
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latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys
Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had
from chidhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating.
He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city
dismissed him as merely "queer".
"Wilcox" is a name from Lovecraft's own family tree.
The Fleur-de-Lys Building is an actual building that still stands in Providence. Bernard K. Hart, a
Providence Journal columnist who lived in the building, took mock-offense at its appropriation by Lovecraft,
and threatened in print to send a ghostly visitor to Lovecraft's own address. Lovecraft's sonnet "The
Messenger" is his response to this threat.
John Raymond Legrasse
A New Orleans police inspector who led the raid on the Cthulhu cult on November 1, 1907.
Described as "a commonplace-looking middle-aged man".
Horror writer C. J. Henderson wrote a series of short stories with Legrasse as their protagonist,
which were collected under the title The Tales of Inspector Legrasse.
Legrasse also appeared as a friend and confidant of Justin Sabbath in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The
Whisperer in Darkness graphic novel, written by Mark Ellis.
Castro
An "immensely aged mestizo...who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying
leaders of the cult in the mountains of China." Arrested on November 1, 1907 during a New Orleans police
raid on a cult ceremony.
Robert M. Price believes that Castro's name is based on that of Adolphe DeCastro--born Adolph
Danziger--an author of "unbelievably bad fiction" who hired Lovecraft as a ghostwriter. Joshi and Schultz,
however, report that Lovecraft did not become acquainted with DeCastro until late 1927.
William Channing Webb
A professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and "an explorer of no slight note".
When Inspector Legrasse conferred with a meeting of the American Anthropology Society about the
Cthulhu Cult, Professor Webb was the only member of the assembly to be familiar with an idol
found during the raid and the ritualistic chants used by the cult, based on his investigation of a
"singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux" he encountered "high up on the West Greenland
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coast" in 1860.
Gustaf Johansen
A Norwegian sailor "of some intelligence", the second mate of the Emma out of Auckland, whose
home address was in Oslo's Old Town. He died shortly after his return from the South Pacific in 1925; his
papers, found posthumously, provide the only first-hand account of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's fiction. His report
was written in English to spare his wife from learning the horror of Cthulhu.
Price suggests that Johansen's nationality is a tip of the hat to the Kraken, a creature from
Norwegian folklore, for helping to inspire Cthulhu.
Cthulhu
While not strictly a character, Cthulhu does play a key role in the story as the antagonist. Cthulhu is
the lord of R'lyeh, and the ancient being that came from the stars hundreds of millions of years ago, to
destroy the elder beings on our world. After the task was completed, the god retreated to R'lyeh and became
trapped in his sunken tomb.
At the end of the story, Cthulhu is awakened by the sailors, and proceeds to slaughter them. As two
escape to their boat, the creature gives chase, wading into the ocean after them. A sailor then rams the boat
into Cthulhu's head, bursting it; it immediately starts to reform, but whilst the creature is scattered, the boat
retreats.
Literary significance & criticism
Lovecraft himself called "The Call of Cthulhu" "rather middlingnot as bad as the worst, but full
of cheap and cumbrous touches." It was originally rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who
only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, talked it up to Wright and falsely
claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.
When it was published, however, some hailed it as a remarkable achievement. "Mr. Lovecraft's
latest story, 'The Call of Cthulhu', is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest
achievements of literature," Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) wrote in a letter to Weird Tales. "Mr.
Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our
paltry ken. His scope is unlimited, and his range is cosmic."
Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon calls the story "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle
narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions." It is, he adds, "one of
Lovecraft's bleakest fictional expressions of man's insignificant place in the universe."
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Bibliography
Timo Airaksinen, The Philosophy of HP Lovecraft The Route to Horror, in New Studies in
Aesthetics 29, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999
Daniel Harms, Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (Call of Cthulhu Fiction) December 1994 by Chaosium
Translated Books
Dagon si alte povestiri macabre, Editura Leda, 2007
Monstrul din prag, Editura Vremea, 1993
Demoni si miracole Editura Corint, 1995

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