Lovecraft, H. P. (1890-1937), an American author, was one of the major writers of supernatural and horror fiction of the 1900’s. Lovecraft’s novels and stories show his fascination with dark forces in New England settings that sometimes seem realistic and other times seem fantastic and dreamlike. Much of Lovecraft’s fiction explores the sensation of the “weird.” In many of his tales, the characters and the reader are forced into an awareness that humanity has an uncertain and relatively insignificant place in the universe.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on Aug. 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. He wrote his first supernatural story, “Dagon,” in 1917. It was published in 1923 in Weird Tales magazine, the magazine that published many of his stories. He died on March 15, 1937. Nearly all his fiction was published in book form only after his death. A selection of his stories was published by the Library of America as Tales (2005). The collection includes one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” which first appeared in Weird Tales in 1928. Cthulhu is a giant monster, a combination of human, octopus, and dragon. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft was published in 2014.
