Lovecraft died obscure yet built cosmic horror’s map
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) wrote weird, horror, fantasy, and science fiction, inventing the Cthulhu Mythos. Cosmicism—his philosophy that humanity is insignificant—drives the fiction. He never lived off writing, staying nearly unknown beyond pulp circles in his lifetime.
He was born on 20 August 1890 in the family home in Providence, Rhode Island, the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Susie Phillips. His father broke down mentally while staying in Chicago and was placed in Providence’s Butler Hospital in April 1893. The boy grew up with his doting, grief-stricken mother, two aunts and his maternal grandparents; grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a businessman, became what Lovecraft called the centre of his universe and steered him toward the classics and English poetry. His grandmother Robie’s death in 1896 plunged the household into a lasting gloom.
The child was precocious. At five, told Santa Claus was a myth, he asked why God was not one too; at seven he wrote poems reworking the Odyssey, and by eight he was absorbed in chemistry and astronomy. From 1902 he hectographed his own Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy and showed friends the sky through his telescope, though illnesses kept pulling him out of school.
Then the money went. Whipple’s businesses faltered around 1900, his largest venture collapsed in spring 1904, and he died of a stroke at 70 months later, forcing mother and son into a small duplex. Lovecraft later called this among the darkest times of his life and admitted he had considered suicide. A severe breakdown in 1908 ended his schooling; he never graduated and never reached Brown University, and one psychologist has suggested childhood chorea minor to explain reported tics.
His stories, mostly set in a fictional New England, fold science fiction into horror to show how fragile a human-centred worldview is, and they brood on the decline he believed the West was suffering. A scholarly revival from the 1970s established him as a central twentieth-century writer of supernatural horror, and the adjective Lovecraftian entered the language.
Source: H. P. Lovecraft
