But the couple quickly ran into financial difficulties, and Lovecraft came to loathe the bustling immensity of the metropolis. Greene, and in early 1924 he decided to marry her and move to Brooklyn. Around this time he developed a romance with an amateur writer, Sonia H. The establishment of Weird Tales in 1923 provided a professional venue for his tales, and he quickly became one of the leading contributors to this pulp magazine. Initially his tales were relatively conventional ventures into the macabre, strongly inspired by Poe but gradually he expanded his horizons, gradually incorporating the notion of “cosmicism” (the idea that human life is utterly inconsequential amidst the vast confines of space and time) into his stories it would be his signature contribution to literature. In 1917 he resumed the writing of weird fiction, which he had abandoned nine years earlier. For the next ten years he devoted much of his time and energy to this realm, writing immense quantities of poetry and essays and also holding several high offices in the two major amateur journalism organizations. He emerged from his hermitry in a curious way, by conducting a feud in the letter column of the Argosy, a popular magazine this led to his entry into the realm of amateur journalism in 1914. He retreated into hermitry, gaining immense erudition from voracious readings but becoming shy and withdrawn he also learned no trade or occupation, consigning him to ever-increasing poverty.

After the early death of his father, his upbringing was left to the hands of his grandfather, uncle, and an increasingly neurotic mother.īecause of poor health, his formal schooling was highly irregular, and he attended Hope Street High School for only three years before dropping out in 1908. His discovery of the work of Edgar Allan Poe inspired him to attempt his own weird tales. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, R.I., on August 20, 1890, he displayed early precociousness by reading the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights by the age of five or six soon thereafter he developed an interest in chemistry, and later in astronomy.

H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi