“I am Providence, and Providence is myself.”

Wanderers through ancient Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, may come across a small slanting gravestone, in the shadow of a larger family monument, bearing only a name, birth and death dates, and the curious inscription: “I AM PROVIDENCE.” Those not familiar with the author there interred might mistake the grave for that of a minor local politician or civic booster, the Buddy Cianci of his day. In fact, it marks the resting place of Rhode Island’s most famous literary figure: the horror and fantasy writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Who was he, this strangest and most devoted of native sons? H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence on August 20, 1890, and died there, at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital, on the ides of March, 1937. Except for a short and disillusioning stay in New York, Providence was the writer’s lifelong home, and more than home: it could be said that the “glamorous old city,” filled with traces of the colonial era Lovecraft wished he had been born into, was his first and last love. Certainly his famous letter of 1926, describing the native’s return, is filled with all the rapture of a lover reunited with his once-lost beloved:

Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air … Kingston -- East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway -- Apponaug and its ancient roofs -- Auburn -- just outside the city limits -- I fumble with bags and wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm -- THEN -- a delirious marble dome outside the window -- a hissing of air brakes -- a slackening of speed -- surges of ecstacy and dropping of clouds from my eyes and mind -- HOME -- UNION STATION --PROVIDENCE!!!!

Yet in his 46 years, Lovecraft was known by few in his native city, and honored by fewer. As a writer in the gothic tradition, he never reached a wider market than the specialized audience of the horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulp magazines. Despite some tantalizing but discouraging near misses, he never saw a collection of his short stories published in book form. He considered himself a failure, a “total loss and never-was” whose death would sadden no one and whose life would be forgotten. But he was wrong.

Like a character in one of his own weird tales, Lovecraft died only to be reanimated. His friends -- many of whom he knew only through his amazingly prolific letter-writing -- kept Lovecraft’s reputation alive after his death, collecting his scattered tales, and eventually his letters, for hardcover publication and donating his manuscripts to the John Hay Library of Brown University, which was at first reluctant to accept them. At the time, it was perhaps difficult to imagine that stories with titles like “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Rats in the Walls” would ever become the subject of serious literary study. Yet today, more than sixty years after his death, Lovecraft has been the subject of numerous theses and doctoral dissertations, books and journal articles. He has been compared to Poe, Borges, and Kafka. His work supports two publishing houses Arkham House and Necronomicon Press, and a critical journal, Lovecraft Studies. The John Hay Library itself draws Lovecraft scholars from around the world.

Unlike many academically favored authors, H.P. Lovecraft is also popular, even a cult figure. Lovecraft’s work crosses the boundaries between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction, and he has been admired or cited as an influence by writers of magical realism (Jorge Luis Borges), contemporary fiction (Joyce Carol Oates, Fred Chappell), horror (Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell), science fiction (Philip K. Dick), and graphic novels (Neil Gaiman). Just as mystery writers are honored with the Edgar Award, named for Poe’s pioneering detective fiction, World Fantasy Award honorees receive the “Howard,” a bust of Lovecraft designed by New Yorker cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Lovecraft has been adapted for the screen, though seldom well. Stuart Gordon’s gleefully gory Re-Animator (1985), emphasising the black comedy and self-parody aspects of Lovecraft’s own least favorite story, is probably the best of the bunch; others simply throw some Lovecraftian references into a standard slasher plot or make inexplicable casting decisions (Sandra Dee in The Dunwich Horror -- Gidget Goes Goth?). There’s even a popular Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu, based (loosely) on Lovecraft’s “artificial pantheon” of gods and monsters.

Joyce Carol Oates, who edited Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (Ecco Press, 1998), probably the first collection of Lovecraft’s work marketed as literary fiction rather than fantasy or horror, discovered Lovecraft in her teen years, as so many of his admirers have. “I’d first read Lovecraft when I was a young adolescent, which is perhaps the best time to read Lovecraft,” she said in an interview with Dark Echo Horror. In a talk given at Brown University at the 100th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth, S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s biographer and editor of the corrected texts of his works, spoke of discovering Lovecraft’s work at age 13 in a public library in Indiana and feeling that he had stumbled into “a secret, almost illicit world.” Perhaps there is something about the intensity of adolescence that makes it the perfect time to fall into Lovecraft’s dark and obsessive vision. His stories come from a place of deep dreaming, some fantastic and archetypal realm of the uncensored mind, and the gates to that world are less firmly closed in youth, as Lovecraft knew. In his stories “The Silver Key” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” both starring the Lovecraftian protagonist Randolph Carter, the hero’s quest for a mystic land of beauty culminates in a return to childhood: “For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth.”

“In everything, I am an outsider.”
--H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s youth, though lonely and scarred by tragic losses, was for him as for his alter ego a golden country to which he dreamed of returning. The large and comfortable family home at 454 Angell Street where Lovecraft was born, later lost following the death of his grandfather and dwindling of the family fortune, represented for him a paradise never to be regained. Its loss marked the end of his childhood and the first time he seriously considered suicide. He wrote to a friend years later: “I had lost my entire adjustment to the cosmos … How could an old man of 14 (and I surely felt that way!) readjust his existence to a skimpy flat … in which almost nothing familiar remained?” Characteristically, Lovecraft was saved from self-annihilation by scientific and intellectual curiosity: so much remained for him to learn!

Lovecraft was, in the succinct words of an early biographer, “unfortunate in his parents.” His father, a salesman for the Gorham Silversmiths, was stricken with what was then called a “general paresis” but is now believed to have been a form of syphilis; he was hospitalized when Lovecraft was three and died five years later. His mother, by all accounts a highly neurotic woman, lamented that her son had not been born a girl; she dressed her “Little Sunshine” in feminine clothing and kept his blond hair in long ringlets, until the young Lovecraft protested. As Lovecraft matured, his mother continued to display a disturbing combination of possessive pride and personal antipathy toward him. She would tell neighbors that her son was a gifted poet, yet at the same time insist that he was so hideous he dared not walk the streets for fear of showing his horrible face. She, too, was eventually hospitalized at Butler Hospital, and died there in 1921.

Fortunately, Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, was a strong and nurturing father figure (Lovecraft remembered him as the man who introduced him to ghost stories), and his grandmother, aunts, and uncles provided the family stability his parents lacked. Lovecraft was a child prodigy: reciting poetry at two, reading at four, composing a verse retelling of the Odyssey at seven, and quoting Latin at eight. It was around this time that Lovecraft produced his first fiction. An interest in science blossomed next, and by nine he was producing a small newspaper called The Scientific Gazette on a home printing press. His first professional publication came at fifteen, with a letter published in the Providence Journal, and he soon began writing astronomy columns for two local papers. His interests weren’t wholly intellectual: he and his youthful gang of friends organized a detective agency, formed a band, rode bikes, and built clubhouses.

Adolescence proved more problematic for Lovecraft. His school years, especially toward the end of high school, were marked by spotty attendance and mysterious health problems. Instead of entering Brown University, as it had been expected he would, Lovecraft withdrew from the world and lived a shadowy, hermit-like existence from which he emerged gradually during his twenties when he became active in the amateur journalism movement and came in contact with other writers. In his early letters, Lovecraft paints himself as a frail and supersensitive Roderick Usher, a semi-invalid, “only half alive,” plagued by blinding headaches and mysterious nervous ailments. It is telling that these nervous afflictions seemed to vanish with the death of Lovecraft’s mother. In his story “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Lovecraft describes another youthful prodigy, Edward Derby, following his mother’s death: “Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.”

The early 1920s were indeed a time of exhilaration and experimentation for Lovecraft. In the small world of amateur journalism -- roughly comparable to the “zine” culture of more recent history --he shone, and soon held various offices, published in amateur magazines, and edited his own small journal, The Conservative. He had taken up fiction again in 1917 at the urging of a writer friend, and he wrote prolifically: mostly stylized gothic tales showing the influence of Poe and fantasies influenced by Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft’s original voice and vision were beginning to develop, but had not yet reached full flower. Still, some of the themes that were to dominate his work emerged in his early tales. In “Dagon,” Lovecraft’s first professionally published story, a shipwrecked sailor finds evidence of strange beings on an unearthed volcanic island; this theme of a monstrous undersea race was later developed in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” In “The Tomb,” a young man is possessed by the spirits of his dead ancestors, an idea Lovecraft explored in his short novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Another early Lovecraft story, “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” introduces a favorite Lovecraftian theme, the fear of ancestry, as a young man discovers himself to be the product of inhuman miscegenation: “If we knew what we are,” Lovecraft wrote, “we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.” The discovery of unsettling family secrets figures prominently in some of Lovecraft’s best fiction, including “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The latter story is a particularly subtle treatment of the theme, as the narrator, at first threatened by a horror from without, slowly comes to recognize the horror within himself -- and, finally, to accept and even exult in his otherworldly heritage.

Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to supernatural fiction, provided Lovecraft with a paying market for his work. At one point in the 1920s, he was in nearly every issue and was even offered an editorial position (he declined, as it would mean leaving Providence). Through Weird Tales, Lovecraft came into contact with other horror and fantasy writers, many of whom became lifelong friends and correspondents. He was asked to ghost-write a story for magician Harry Houdini and was, or so it seemed, on the verge of financial as well as artistic success. Emboldened by his successful plunge into the wide world, Lovecraft took an even greater plunge in 1924 and and married Sonia Haft Greene, a Russian-born writer and entrepreneur he had met through the world of amateur publishing. It was an unlikely match. Sonia was seven years Lovecraft’s senior, with a grown daughter; she was cosmopolitan, warm, extroverted, and a Jew. Lovecraft was provincial, having seldom traveled outside of New England; he had claimed to be uninterested in “amatory phenomena;” he was reserved, cerebral, introverted, xenophobic, and a classic WASP. Yet Lovecraft’s letters, written just after his marriage, display a boyish enthusiasm for his re-invention of himself as a budding paterfamilias. After a honeymoon spent frantically retyping a manuscript that had been lost, the couple moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and Lovecraft declared himself to be alive as he had never been before.

Alas, his euphoria quickly faded, as did the marriage, in the face of financial strain. Sonia’s business, a hat shop, failed, and Lovecraft, who had never held a job in his life, was forced to look for work in some highly unlikely places: he once spent approximately one day as a salesman for a collections agency. Unable to find work in New York, Sonia took a temporary position in Cleveland, leaving Lovecraft in a city that had begun to take on a nightmare quality for him. The death of Houdini had put an end to plans for future collaborations, and Lovecraft’s other literary work -- his own stories and his editing and revision services -- was barely enough to keep him alive, even on the frugal daily diet he recorded as “1 loaf bread--$0.06; 1 medium can beans--$0.14; 1/4 lb. Cheese--$0.10.” His weight plummeted. He moved to a cheap rooming house and had nearly all his clothing stolen by burglars. Despite the proximity of friends Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman, and other members of his literary “gang” that met for weekly meetings, Lovecraft, uprooted from his native soil, fell into depression. His xenophobia increased to nearly pathological dimensions, and his letters from his “New York exile” period are filled with racist rants about “mongrel gutter-rats,” “loathsome Asiatic hordes,” and “squat, squint-eyed jabberers.” He wanted only to come home -- and, in March, 1926, he did go home, moving into an apartment on Providence’s east side with his aunts.

Lovecraft’s return to Providence inspired an unparalleled burst of creative energy. In 1926 and the ten years that followed, he produced his greatest work, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Dunwich Horror”-stories that, despite their flights of cosmic fancy, were deeply rooted in New England. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, written soon after his return, reflects Lovecraft’s delving into Rhode Island’s colonial history.

But what of Sonia? While Lovecraft was reborn as a writer, his marriage was effectively dead, and any attempts to revive it failed. “Trying to exist in N.Y. drove me close to madness, and trying to think of living in Rhode Island drove the late missus equally close to despair,” Lovecraft told a correspondent. They were divorced in 1929, and Lovecraft resumed his eccentric bachelor existence with something like a sigh of relief. Still, his world had opened up. Over the next ten years, Lovecraft traveled as far north as Quebec and as far south as Florida, visiting some --though by no means all -- of the writer friends he had come to know through correspondence. It has been said of Lovecraft that he wrote letters the way other people talked, and his letters --estimated at 75,000 or more -- sometimes ran to forty pages of closely written comments on everything from history, science, and economic theory to favorite brands of doughnuts. Lovecraft carried on literary and philosophical debates with his peers, writers like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; with younger writers, including Robert Bloch, Fritz Lieber, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei, he was a gracious and generous mentor. His influence on these writers was profound, although many of them never met him. Shortly after Lovecraft’s death, Derleth and Wandrei founded Arkham House, named for the witch-haunted city of Lovecraft’s fiction, and published the first H.P. Lovecraft story collection, The Outsider and Others. Originally offered at $3.50, this rarest of HPL collectibles today commands up to $600. Arkham House continued to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and five volumes of his letters, and Derleth, especially, was tireless in promoting Lovecraft’s work. For this, he won a place of honor among Lovecraft fans, but he was less admired for his practice of publishing “posthumous collaborations” between himself and Lovecraft and his attempts to codify Lovecraft’s dream-universe into a Christian-like “Cthulhu Mythos” of good and evil gods. In reality, Lovecraft’s vision was cosmic rather than humanocentric. His extra-worldly entities, dubiously shaped beings such as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Azathoth, were neither gods nor demons, though humans might worship them as such. They were simply from outside, indifferent to human notions of good or evil. In “The Colour Out of Space,” Lovecraft’s most finely wrought tale of terror, an otherworldly visitation blights land and people, but there is no monster in the conventional sense, perhaps even no conscious being: “It was just a colour out of space-a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all nature as we know it.”

As his writing matured, Lovecraft’s fiction grew longer, more subtle and complex, and less classifiable as pure horror. Two of his later long stories, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” were published in Astounding Science Fiction. But a series of rejections, both from book publishers and from his old standby Weird Tales, undermined his confidence and left him bitterly discouraged. Although frustrated by his limited audience and lack of financial success, Lovecraft remained true to his unique artistic vision rather than changing his work to fit the fickle taste of pulp editors, as some of his writer friends suggested. Not only did Lovecraft choose not to write commercial stories, he felt (doubtless correctly) that any attempts he made to do so would not be successful. “It may kill the artist,” he wrote of pandering to commercialism, “but it will never make a businessman of the corpse.” Poor and growing ever poorer, living off a dwindling inheritance and the meager payment he received for his writing and the revision of others’ work, he wrote toward the end of his life: “God knows I want a job-but I want it to be anything … except writing. Anything except a parody on the only thing in life that means anything to me.” Of course, jobs in depression-era Rhode Island were hardly plentiful, especially for 45-year-old recluse/writers with no history of past employment. Living on as little as ten or fifteen cents per day, Lovecraft wondered if he would have to “take the cyanide route” when the last of his family’s money ran out. Illness spared him the decision. The vague stomach trouble he alluded to only occasionally in his letters was in fact intestinal cancer, and Lovecraft died at 46.

H.P. Lovecraft was not without flaws, as man and writer. Yet all those who knew him testify to his kindness and generosity of spirit. When a 15-year-old fan sent him a blatantly imitative story, Lovecraft would respond with genuine praise for the story’s promise and gentle but thorough editorial suggestions. In his short life, he never stopped growing. His letters demonstrate his formidable and never-ending self-education, with discussions of Einsteinian theory, modern socialism, and ancient Rome, as well as his playful side, with mock family trees for his tentacled creatures and tales of the fraternal meetings of neighborhood cats. His fiction, his most lasting legacy, stands as one of the truly unique creations of the twentieth century: a dream-reality so powerful it has taken on the status of myth. Fritz Leiber, himself an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, called Lovecraft “a literary Copernicus” for his cosmic vision. For one who found a lifelong fascination and wonder in the stars and the “deep skyey voids,” it seems a fitting tribute.

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft (And Where to Find It)

Short Fiction

Almost everything Lovecraft ever wrote is in print somewhere in the world, and hard-core fans will want to read every word -- but those new to Lovecraft will probably prefer to start with a selection of his best weird fiction.

Lovecraft’s stories are still published in hardcover by Arkham House, in now in corrected texts taken from his original manuscripts. The Dunwich Horror and Others includes Lovecraft’s most famous short fiction, while At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels collects the longer pieces, and Dagon and Other Macabre Tales contains Lovecraft’s early stories, from “The Alchemist,” written in his teens, through the mid-1920s.

Penguin publishes a good selection of these in two paperback collections, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, is a good one-volume selection of his work, and Ballantine’s The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre is a comprehensive paperback collection, although this edition does not use the corrected texts.

Texts of Lovecraft’s stories are also available online at The H.P. Lovecraft Library. Copyright issues may apply (see explanation at site), and the site doesn't specify whether the works are taken from the corrected texts or not.

Biographies and Letters

Lovecraft’s Selected Letters were published in five volumes by Arkham House. Only two volumes remain in print, but you can read a well-chosen selection of his correspondence in Lord of a Visible World. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has arranged these chronologically to form an “autobiography in letters,” and he provides contextual notes.

Lovecraft at Last by Willis Conover is back in print at last. This touching tribute, originally published in 1975, reprints the correspondence between Lovecraft and the author, then a teenage editor of the “Science-Fantasy Correspondent.” It’s beautifully designed, with reproductions of the actual letters, and shows a playful, humorous side of HPL not apparent in his fiction.

Web Resources

The best and most comprehensive Lovecraft web site is the H.P. Lovecraft Archive maintained by Donovan K. Loucks. It contains a wealth of information about his life, work, and influence on popular culture, and links to just about everything Lovecraftian under the sun (or, given HPL’s nocturnal tendencies, the moon).

Alan Gullette’s Selected Authors of Supernatural Fiction is another excellent site. Lovecraft resources include a biography, web links, and an essay on Poe and Lovecraft by Robert Bloch, HPL’s former teen protégé and author of Psycho. The site contains information on writers Lovecraft admired (Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen) and knew (Clark Ashton Smith).

The H.P. Lovecraft Library (see above), maintained by William Johns, has a great photo gallery, biographical information, and extensive links as well as HTML and PDF texts.

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Kathryn Kulpa discovered H.P. Lovecraft at the age of thirteen and has remained an admirer. She considers his particular fondness for cats to be but one indicator of his genius.

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