<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

H. P. Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was equally remarkable as a fan and as a writer of fantastic literature. In this regard, it's worth pondering S. T. Joshi's comment that Lovecraft's letters (which comprise five volumes) are as important as anything he wrote. A native of Rhode Island, Lovecraft was from early childhood an Anglophile and a lover of the historical. He was plagued by ill-health and appears to have feared that the insanity that ran in his family might affect him as well, although it never did. During his ill-starred marriage in the 1920's, Lovecraft lived in New York City and found he could not tolerate its modernity. Returning to New England, he lived marginally. He ceased writing fiction during the last years of his life, although he kept up his voluminous correspondence until nearly the day of his death from cancer at the age of 47.

Lovecraft began writing fiction more or less within the areas of horror first explored by Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany. "The Outsider" (1921) is possibly the foremost of his tales along the lines of Poe; while "The Cats of Ulthar" (1920) may be the best of his stories after the fashion of Lord Dunsany.

It is his creation of the "Cthulhu Mythos" that has secured his reputation, however. This cycle of stories, and the sequels and related works written by others, constitute the main body of horror fiction in English during the middle of the 20th century. The central conceit of the mythos is that there are beings far more powerful than man in the universe, which human beings are wont to think of as gods (as in "The Call of Cthulhu" 1926). Lovecraft's characters may undertake heroic action to counter these entities, but they are never grand heroes as found in the works of A. Merritt. Often as not what saves people in a Lovecraft story is a matter of chance -- if they are saved at all. "The Colour out of Space" (1927), for instance, concerns the arrival of a meteorite in a New England farm that kills off everything around it, including, eventually, the old Yankee farmer who is too stubborn to leave his farmstead.

Perhaps Lovecraft's most successful story is "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936), in which the central character's personality is displaced hundreds of millions of years backward in time by a species that had settled on Earth during the Permian Era. At the Mountains of Madness (1936) is Lovecraft's most successful novel, dealing with the discovery of a pre-human civilization beneath the Antarctic ice.

Edmund Wilson wrote two essays dismissing Lovecraft following the publication of the first collection of his works in 1939. This has long had the effect of inculcating antipathy to Lovecraft in graduate programs in English in the United States. As a sign that some of the attitude spawned by Wilson has dissipated, the Library of America published a collection of Lovecraft's work in 2004.

There are numerous works on Lovecraft worth reading, but L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), and S. T. Joshi's rebuttal, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) are good places to begin. As a general survey of Lovecraft and his writing, few books are as thoughtful and readable as Maurice Lévy's Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (translated from the French by S. T. Joshi, 1988).