A short life of the author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born on 20 August 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a travelling salesman who was committed to Butler Hospital in 1893 with what was almost certainly syphilitic psychosis and died there in 1898, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, a woman of old Providence stock who alternated between smothering devotion and terrified revulsion toward her son, whom she told he was “hideous.”
Life and Career
Lovecraft grew up in the house of his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a prosperous businessman who encouraged the boy’s voracious reading and allowed him the run of his extensive library. Lovecraft was a prodigy — reading at three, writing at six, consuming Poe, the Arabian Nights, Greek mythology, and astronomy with equal voracity — but he was also sickly, nervous, and socially isolated. His grandfather’s death in 1904 and the consequent loss of the family home was a trauma from which he never fully recovered.
He suffered a nervous collapse in 1908 that prevented him from graduating from Hope High School or attending Brown University, the failure he considered the great catastrophe of his life. For the next decade he lived as a virtual recluse in Providence, writing amateur journalism, revising other people’s work, and corresponding prolifically — his surviving letters number over 100,000 pages, making him one of the great epistolary figures of the twentieth century.
His fiction career began in earnest with the publication of “Dagon” in The Vagrant in 1919 and his acceptance by Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that would publish most of his significant work. In 1924 he married Sonia H. Greene, a Russian-Jewish businesswoman (an irony given his virulent anti-Semitism), and moved to New York City. The marriage was unhappy; Lovecraft loathed New York, couldn’t find work, and returned to Providence in 1926. The marriage effectively ended, though they did not divorce until 1929.
Back in Providence, he produced the great works of his maturity in a sustained creative burst between 1926 and 1935: “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written 1927, published posthumously 1941), “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), At the Mountains of Madness (1936), “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (written 1931, published 1936), and “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936). He lived in genteel poverty, subsisting on the small income from his revision work and the pittances paid by pulp magazines.
He died of intestinal cancer combined with Bright’s disease on 15 March 1937, at the age of forty-six. He was buried in his family’s plot in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence.
Major Works and Themes
Lovecraft’s central innovation was cosmic horror — the idea that the universe is fundamentally alien and indifferent to human existence, that human civilisation is a negligible episode in a cosmos of unimaginable age and scale, and that the greatest horror lies not in ghosts or vampires but in the revelation of humanity’s insignificance. His alien entities — Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth — are not evil in any moral sense; they are simply incomprehensible.
“The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) is the foundational story of the Mythos: a narrative pieced together from documents, newspaper clippings, and testimony that gradually reveals the existence of a vast, sleeping alien god beneath the Pacific, worshipped by cults around the world. The technique — documentary, accretive, pseudo-scholarly — became Lovecraft’s signature method.
At the Mountains of Madness (1936) is his most ambitious work: a novella-length account of an Antarctic expedition that discovers the ruins of a city built by the Elder Things, an alien race that predates humanity by hundreds of millions of years. The narrative achieves a genuine sense of the sublime in its vision of deep time and alien architecture.
“The Colour Out of Space” (1927), which Lovecraft himself considered his finest story, describes the arrival of a meteorite on a Massachusetts farm and the incomprehensible transformation it causes — colours that don’t belong to the visible spectrum, vegetation that grows in impossible forms, a family that slowly disintegrates. It is horror stripped of all Gothic trappings, reduced to the pure encounter with the alien.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Lovecraft was virtually unknown outside the readership of Weird Tales during his lifetime. His posthumous reputation is the work of his friends and literary executors, particularly August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House in 1939 specifically to publish Lovecraft’s collected fiction in hardcover.
His reputation has risen continuously since the 1960s and has exploded in the twenty-first century. He is now recognised as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century — the founder of a tradition of cosmic horror that extends through Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, and Jeff VanderMeer, and an influence on Stephen King, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro, H.R. Giger, and countless horror films, video games, and tabletop games.
His racism — virulent, pervasive, and at times extreme even by the standards of his era — is the unavoidable complication. It pervades some of his fiction (particularly “The Horror at Red Hook” and aspects of The Shadow Over Innsmouth) and much of his correspondence. The World Fantasy Award removed his image from its trophy in 2015. His legacy is inseparable from this contradiction.
Key Works
- “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928)
- “The Colour Out of Space” (1927)
- “The Dunwich Horror” (1929)
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)
- At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
- “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936)
- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941, written 1927)
- The Outsider and Others (1939, first collection)
- Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943, second collection)
Collecting Lovecraft
Lovecraft collecting is dominated by the Arkham House editions — the small-press hardcovers published by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei’s Sauk City, Wisconsin, press beginning in 1939. Because Lovecraft published no books during his lifetime (aside from The Shadow Over Innsmouth, 1936, Visionary Publishing Company, in an edition of approximately 400 copies, of which only about 200 were bound), the Arkham House editions function as his de facto first editions.
The Outsider and Others (1939, Arkham House), the first collection, is the supreme Lovecraft collectible. Published in an edition of 1,268 copies at $5.00, it contains most of his major stories. Fine copies in the original dust jacket (black, with orange lettering) bring $10,000–$30,000. The jacket is essential; copies without it are available at $2,000–$5,000.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943, Arkham House, 1,217 copies) is the second collection, containing stories and essays not included in the first. Fine copies in the jacket bring $3,000–$8,000.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936, Visionary Publishing Company) is the only Lovecraft book published during his lifetime. Of the approximately 400 copies printed, only about 200 were bound (150 for sale, 50 for the author). The first edition, in black cloth with gilt spine lettering, is an extreme rarity that commands $5,000–$20,000 depending on condition.
The pulp magazines in which Lovecraft’s stories originally appeared — particularly Weird Tales — are collected avidly. Issues containing major stories (“The Call of Cthulhu” in the February 1928 issue, for example) bring $500–$3,000 depending on condition. Lovecraft cover stories are especially desirable.
Lovecraft autograph material is scarce in the traditional sense — he did not sign books for collectors — but his letters are extraordinarily abundant (he was one of the most prolific correspondents of the twentieth century) and of significant literary value. Routine letters bring $500–$2,000; letters of literary or biographical substance command significantly more. Major collections are held at the John Hay Library (Brown University) and the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas).