H. P. Lovecraft
1890–1937
Biography
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer of weird fiction, horror and science fiction. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent most of his life in New England. After his father was committed to an asylum in 1893, the family's finances declined, and Lovecraft lived for much of his adult life with little money. He wrote essays and letters for amateur journals and published his stories mainly in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. He married Sonia Greene in 1924 and moved to New York, but he returned to Providence in 1926 and wrote there until his death at the age of 46.
Lovecraft is best known for the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe of ancient cosmic beings, forbidden books and the New England towns where they lurk, which later writers expanded. His fiction rests on a philosophy he called cosmicism: humanity is a tiny and indifferent part of an immense universe. Stories such as At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow over Innsmouth developed these ideas. He was almost unknown while alive, but after a revival in the 1970s he came to be counted among the major horror writers of the twentieth century. Some of his letters and stories express racist and xenophobic attitudes, which many readers reject today and which should be weighed when his work is read.
The site holds The call of Cthulhu, the story that introduced many readers to the sunken city of R'lyeh and its sleeping master. It appeared in Weird Tales in 1928 and is told through documents gathered by a narrator, a method Lovecraft used often to build a sense of dread.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a cosmic horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928. The story is a founding document of the Cthulhu Mythos, a mythopoeia and shared…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Call of Cthulhu (CC BY-SA 4.0)