Howard Phillips Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft in 1934
Born	Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-08-20)August 20, 1890 Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Died	March 15, 1937(1937-03-15) (aged 46) Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Resting place	Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Pen name	Lewis Theobald Humphrey Littlewit Ward Phillips Edward Softly
Occupation	Short story writer, editor, novelist, poet
Period	1917–1937
Genre	Dark fantasy, gothic fiction, horror fiction, science fiction, weird fiction
Literary movement	Cosmicism
Notable works	"The Call of Cthulhu" The Shadow Out of Time At the Mountains of Madness
Spouse	Sonia Greene (1924–1937)
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (/ˈlʌvkræft, -ˌkrɑːft/; August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth", both canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor. He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time that he died at age 46.

Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in his family home at 194 (later 456) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island (the house was demolished in 1961). He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853–1898), a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft (1857–1921), who could trace her ancestry to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. Both of his parents were of entirely English ancestry, and most of his ancestors had been in New England since the colonial period. His great-grandfather Joseph Lovecraft Jr. emigrated to Rochester, New York from Devon, England in 1831. Lovecraft's father became acutely psychotic in 1893, when Lovecraft was three, and he was placed in the Providence psychiatric institution of 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." It has been suggested that his father's mental illness may have been caused by syphilis, but neither Lovecraft nor his mother (who also died in Butler Hospital) seem to have shown signs of being infected with the disease.