H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 20 August 1890 and spent nearly all of his life there. His father was committed to a psychiatric hospital when Lovecraft was a small boy and died there in 1898. He was raised by his mother, his aunts and his grandfather, a prosperous businessman whose death in 1904 left the family much poorer. A breakdown kept Lovecraft from finishing high school, and he never went to university. He spent his late teens largely shut away, reading astronomy, chemistry and eighteenth-century literature.

He found his way out through amateur journalism, a network of hobbyist writers who published small magazines and wrote endless letters to one another. He joined it in 1914, began writing fiction again in 1917, and from 1923 sold most of his stories to the pulp magazine Weird Tales. In 1924 he married Sonia Greene and moved to New York, but the marriage and the move both failed, and by April 1926 he was back in Providence for good. The next decade produced most of the work he is known for, including The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space and The Dunwich Horror. He also wrote a long essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, that is still a useful map of the field before him. He died of cancer on 15 March 1937, aged forty-six, poor and almost unknown outside his circle of correspondents.

His reputation was built afterward. Two of his friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, founded the publishing house Arkham House in 1939 to put his stories between hard covers. Since then the shared mythology of ancient beings, forbidden books and decaying New England towns that he and his friends traded back and forth, the “Cthulhu Mythos,” has spread through novels, films, tabletop games and toy shops. “Cosmic horror,” the idea that the true terror is a universe vast, old and indifferent to human beings, is now a genre label largely because of him.

Lovecraft’s racism also has to be part of any honest account. It is open and ugly in his letters, and it shapes some of his fiction, sometimes at the level of the plot. The Reader’s Companions for his stories on this site point it out where it matters rather than pass over it.

The thirteen Lovecraft stories here run from early dream fantasies like The Cats of Ulthar through short, Poe-influenced pieces such as The Outsider and The Music of Erich Zann to the major cosmic tales. If you’re new to him, The Music of Erich Zann and Pickman's Model are good first reads. Our guide Where to Start with Lovecraft suggests a reading order.