H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He spent most of his years completely cut off from the world and the times in which he lived. He died in 1937 at the age of 47. He was a dedicated student of his town's antiquities and perhaps his background gave him the natural inclination that made him an Anglophile for life. His health in his early years was not very stable, so he spent them sheltered within the family, and this partial incapacity allowed him to read all the time. As a result, the sensitive, dreamy child very early on created a strange world of his own, haunted by the creatures of his imagination. Much of his fiction belonging to the realm of the supernatural developed from this world. From a very young age he gave evidence of his poetic ability and at the age of 15 he wrote his first short story. Lovecraft as a child was shy while as an adult he was distant, almost reclusive. He was tall, thin and usually pale, although he had bright and very lively eyes. His jaw protruded. His character was gentle. His conversation revealed a surprisingly rich vocabulary and an immediate use of words, a fact quite evident in his novels. In the two decades alone that his writing life spanned, Lovecraft became a master of the macabre, and in his time there was no equal in America. He began writing early but failed to get anything published in any widely circulated magazine. Having British ancestors, his literary influences were British rather than American - Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany in particular - rather than the American ones of the Gothic tradition of Poe. Lovecraft's works were never published on a large scale during his lifetime, and only one short novel appeared printed and bound by an amateur but enthusiastic publisher.