H. P. Lovecraft Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, into a New England family proud of its colonial lineage. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman, suffered a severe mental collapse when his son was a small child and spent the remainder of his life in institutional care, dying in 1898. Lovecraft was raised primarily by his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, and by his maternal grandparents, the prosperous Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Robie Alzada Place Phillips, in an ornate Providence home that supplied much of the antique atmosphere he later cherished in his fiction. His grandfather encouraged early reading and storytelling, introducing him to classical literature, poetry, and Gothic tales. The death of Whipple Phillips in 1904 precipitated a financial decline, forcing the family to move to more modest quarters and marking a permanent change in Lovecraft's circumstances.

Health, Education, and Early Interests
Lovecraft's childhood was marked by fragile health, insomnia, and vivid night terrors that later resurfaced as motifs in his narratives. He developed a precocious fascination with science, especially astronomy and chemistry, writing amateur treatises and columns on astronomical topics for local papers. Although intellectually gifted, he struggled with anxiety and illness, which disrupted his formal schooling. He did not complete high school, lacking a final mathematics credit after a breakdown, and never attended college. Instead, he pursued an autodidact's education, devouring history, philosophy, literature, and the sciences, and cultivating a prose style modeled on eighteenth-century essayists and on Edgar Allan Poe.

Amateur Journalism and First Publications
Lovecraft entered the world of amateur journalism in his teens, joining organizations such as the United Amateur Press Association and the National Amateur Press Association. Through these networks he published essays, poems, and fiction, edited amateur journals, and forged enduring friendships. He wrote polemics and literary criticism, often under the title The Conservative, while honing his distinctive approach to weird fiction. Early stories appeared in amateur venues before he began to place tales in pulp magazines, most notably Weird Tales, under the editorship of Farnsworth Wright. This phase established the habits that came to define him: exacting self-criticism, an enormous letter-writing output, and a collaborative sense of community with like-minded writers.

Marriage, New York, and Return to Providence
In 1924 Lovecraft married Sonia Haft Greene, a widowed milliner and writer he had met through the amateur press world. The couple moved to New York City, where Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn and briefly delighted in the city's libraries, bookstores, and literary salons. There he befriended figures such as Samuel Loveman and expanded his circle of correspondents. Yet he struggled to find steady employment, felt out of place amid the metropolis's clamor, and became increasingly despondent as money troubles mounted. Stories from this period, including The Horror at Red Hook, reflect his unease and reveal prejudices that have drawn sustained criticism. The marriage faltered amid economic stress and differing ambitions; the couple separated, and the marriage ended in 1929. In 1926 Lovecraft returned to Providence, a move that restored his creativity and stability.

Major Works and Editorial Relationships
Back in Providence, Lovecraft entered his most productive period. He wrote The Call of Cthulhu, drafted The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and completed such classics as The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow out of Time. He also composed the long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, a sweeping survey that combines criticism with his literary credo. Though Weird Tales became his primary outlet, its editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected some major pieces; At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow out of Time instead appeared in Astounding Stories, while The Shadow over Innsmouth received a poorly produced standalone printing late in his life. He supplemented meager pulp income with revision and ghostwriting work for clients and friends, collaborating with or revising stories for Zealia Bishop, Hazel Heald, and Henry S. Whitehead, among others. A notable commission produced Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (also known as Under the Pyramids) for Harry Houdini, and later he helped prepare an outline for a Houdini book project that lapsed after the magician's death.

Philosophy, Style, and Controversies
Lovecraft's imaginative world rests on an austere materialism he called cosmicism: the view that humanity is insignificant within an indifferent, perhaps hostile, universe governed by vast forces beyond human comprehension. He blended scientific speculation with archaic diction and antiquarian detail, drawing on influences such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James. His settings alternate between imagined New England towns like Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, and the Dreamlands of his Dunsanian phase. The vocabulary of non-Euclidean spaces, eldritch cyclopean ruins, and forbidden texts dramatizes cognitive collapse in the face of the unknown. Alongside these artistic achievements, Lovecraft's racial views, expressed in letters and occasionally in fiction, have prompted sustained criticism. In the 1930s his economic and political outlook moderated; the Great Depression led him to support elements of the New Deal, but his attitudes on race remained deeply problematic and are inseparable from assessments of his legacy.

Correspondence and the Lovecraft Circle
Lovecraft's most prolific medium was correspondence. He exchanged thousands of letters with a wide network of writers and fans, mentoring younger talents and trading ideas that enriched the shared backdrop later dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos. Friends and colleagues included Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, E. Hoffmann Price, and R. H. Barlow. He and his circle jocularly borrowed each other's invented entities and books, weaving a collaborative tapestry that transcended single authorship. The suicide of Robert E. Howard in 1936 deeply affected him, and many letters from this period show a rare personal tenderness. Through this epistolary culture, Lovecraft built the community that preserved his work after his death.

Final Years and Death
The last years of Lovecraft's life were economically strained but artistically resolute. He lived quietly in Providence, caring for elderly relatives, walking the city's historic streets, and revising stories while composing new ones at a deliberate pace. Persistent abdominal pain led to a late diagnosis of intestinal cancer, compounded by malnutrition. He documented his symptoms in a bleak diary of pain through the winter of 1936, 1937. Lovecraft died in Providence on March 15, 1937, at the age of 46. He was buried in the family plot at Swan Point Cemetery. His younger friend R. H. Barlow, named as a literary executor, safeguarded manuscripts and encouraged his posthumous publication.

Posthumous Reputation and Legacy
In life, Lovecraft's readership was confined largely to pulp magazines and the amateur press, and he never enjoyed financial success. After his death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the small press Arkham House in 1939 to issue his fiction in durable editions, beginning a long process through which his reputation rose from cult figure to a central presence in modern horror and weird literature. The loose web of stories and symbols associated with his work came to be called the Cthulhu Mythos, a term popularized and systematized by Derleth, although Lovecraft himself treated it less as a rigid theology than as an atmosphere and a toolbox for shared storytelling. His influence now extends across literature, film, games, and music, inspiring generations of creators while also sparking debate about how to read his work in light of his prejudices. The sentence I am Providence, taken from his letters, has become an emblem of his bond with his native city, whose historical textures nourished his imagination even as his fiction sought vistas far beyond the human horizon.

Our collection contains 21 quotes who is written by P. Lovecraft, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Meaning of Life - Deep - Faith.

Other people realated to P. Lovecraft: Gary Gygax (Inventor), Robert Bloch (Writer), L. Sprague de Camp (Author), Curtis Hanson (Director), David Keith (Actor), Algernon H. Blackwood (Writer)