H. P. Lovecraft

de:H. P. Lovecraft es:Howard_Phillips_Lovecraft fr:Howard Phillips Lovecraft ja:ハワード・フィリップ・ラブクラフト pl:Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937), was an American author of fantasy and horror fiction, noted for giving horror stories a science fiction framework.

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His early fantasies were greatly influenced by the stories of Lord Dunsany, but later took on a much darker tone with the creation of what is today often called the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of deities and horrors which live extra-dimensionally. His stories created one of the most influential plot devices in all of horror: the Necronomicon, the secret grimoire written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

His prose is somewhat antiquarian and tends toward the grand guignol. He was fond of heavy use of unfamiliar adjectives such as "eldritch", "rugose", "noisome", "squamous", and "Cyclopean", and of attempts to transcribe dialect speech which have been criticized as inaccurate. His works also featured British English (he was an admitted Anglophile) as well as anachronistic spellings, such as "compleat/complete", "lanthorn/lantern", and "divers/diverse".

Much of Lovecraft's work was directly inspired by his nightmares, and it is perhaps this direct insight into subconscious fears that helps to account for their continuing popularity.

Many later creators of horror writing and films show influences from Lovecraft, including Clive Barker and H. R. Giger. Others, notably Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth and Brian Lumley, have written stories that are explicitly set in the same "universe" as Lovecraft's original stories.

Biography

Lovecraft was born in his family home at 194 (then 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestors in America back to their arrival in the Massachussetts Bay Colony in 1630. When Lovecraft was three his father was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years. The story of mental collapse was merely a cover, however, to save the family from embarrassment — Lovecraft's father was admitted because syphilis was killing him.

Lovecraft was raised by his mother, two aunts, and his doting grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Lovecraft was something of a prodigy and was reciting poetry at age 2 and was writing by 6. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as 1,001 Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and child's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred young Howard's interest in the weird by telling him original tales of Gothic horror.

Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child. He attended school only sporadically but he read much. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette.

Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, and the family was subsequently impoverished by mismanagement of his property and money. The family was forced to move down Angell Street to much smaller and less comfortable accommodations. Lovecraft was deeply affected by the loss of his home and birthplace and even contemplated suicide for a time. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908, as a result of which he never received his high school diploma. This failure to complete his education — his hopes of ever entering Brown University dashed — nagged at him for the rest of his life.

Lovecraft's first polished stories began to appear around 1917 with The Tomb and Dagon. Also around this time he began to build up his huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were the young Forrest J. Ackerman, Robert Bloch (Psycho) and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series).

Lovecraft's mother died in 1921. Shortly after, he attended an amateur journalist convention where he met Sonia Green. She was Russian, a Jew, and significantly older than Lovecraft. They married, though Lovecraft's aunts were unhappy with the arrangement. The couple moved to the Brooklyn section of New York City. He hated it. A few years later he and Green agreed to an amicable divorce, and he returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.

The period after his return to Providence — the last decade of his life — was Lovecraft's most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing.

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death the following year (1937) in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft's grave in Providence has from time to time been inscribed with a graffito of his most famous turn of phrase, quoted from The Call of Cthulhu:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

Survey of Lovecraft's work

Some stories:

• At the Mountains of Madness
• Cool Air
• Dagon
• The Dreams in the Witch-House
• Herbert West: Reanimator
• Pickman's Model
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - his only novel-length work
• The Cats of Ulthar
• The Colour Out of Space
• The Doom that Came to Sarnath
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Haunter of the Dark
• The Music of Erich Zann
• The Rats in the Walls
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth
• The Shadow Out of Time
• The Terrible Old Man
• The Thing On the Doorstep
• The Whisperer in Darkness

The definitive editions of his work (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, Collected Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings) are published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a lot of other fantastic literature as well.

Adaptations

Films based (generally very loosely) on Lovecraft's works:

• The Haunted Palace, an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (IMDb entry)
• The Resurrected (1992) (another adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) (IMDb entry)
• Re-Animator (1985) (IMDb entry)
• Bride of Re-Animator (1990) (IMDb entry)
• Beyond Re-Animator (2003) (IMDb entry)
• From Beyond (1986) (IMDb entry)
• The Dunwich Horror (1970) (IMDb entry)
• The Unnamable (1988) (IMDb entry)
• The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993) (IMDb entry)
• Dagon (2001) (IMDb entry)
• The Curse (1987) (an unacknowledged 1980s adaptation of The Colour Out of Space) (IMDb entry)
• In the Mouth of Madness (1995) (Satirical John Carpenter horror film about the relationship between horror writers and their audience, that is also a Lovecraft pastiche.) (IMDb entry)

Radio Productions:

• The Call of Cthulhu (Broadcast in Tasmania, on Lovecraft's 100th birthday)

Further reading

For a complete biography of Lovecraft, see Lovecraft, a Biography by L. Sprague de Camp.

A newer, more extensive biography is H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, written by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. It is currently out of print, and used copies are rare, but an adequate alternative is Joshi's abridged A Dreamer & A Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time. A recent check of online bookstores reveals that A Dreamer & A Visionary has become a "special order" title, making it prohibitively expensive.

External Links

• The H.P. Lovecraft Archive
• Essay on Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi
• Links leading to further information