1894-1971 Howard P. Lovecraft Collection · PDF fileLovecraft would later relate that, raised by a sensitive and overprotective mother, he grew up in relative isolation, believing

Howard P. Lovecraft Collection1894-1971 , Ms.LovecraftJohn Hay Library Special Collections
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RIAMCO http://www.riamco.org/render.php?eadid=US-RPB-mslovecraft&view=title
Howard P. Lovecraft Collection1894-1971
John Hay Library Special CollectionsBox ABrown UniversityProvidence, RI 02912Tel: 401-863-2146email: [email protected]
Published in 2003Brown University Library

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Collection overview
Title: Howard P. Lovecraft collection
Date range: 1894-1971
Creator: Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890-1937
Extent:
Abstract: This collection contains correspondence to and fromHoward P. Lovecraft. It also contains many of his originalmanuscripts.
Language of materials: English
Repository: John Hay Library Special Collections
Collection number: Ms.Lovecraft
Arrangement
This collection is organized into the following five series: Series 1. Correspondence and Works not by Lovecraft Series 2. Correspondence from Lovecraft to August W. Derleth Series 3. Correspondence from Howard P. Lovecraft Series 4. Works by Howard P. Lovecraft Early Periodicals, 1890-1909 Early Poetry & Prose, 1890-1909 Poetry, 1910-1937 Non-Fiction, 1910-1937 Fiction, 1910-1937 Drama, 1910-1937 Drawings, 1910-1937 Series 5. Dealers' Catalogs

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Biographical Note
H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered the twentieth century's most important writer ofsupernatural horror fiction. Forging a unique niche within the horror genre, he created whatbecame known as "weird tales," stories containing a distinctive blend of dreamlike imagery,Gothic terror, and elaborate concocted mythology. During his lifetime Lovecraft publishedwork almost exclusively in pulp magazines, and only after his death in 1937 did he receivea wide readership and critical analysis. While many disparage his writings as verbose,melodramatic, and inconsequential, others extol his precise narrative skills and capacityto instill the unsettling. He has been placed among the ranks of such storytellers as LordDunsany, Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe, but, as August Derleth pointed out in H. P.L.: A Memoir, "Lovecraft was an original in the Gothic tradition; he was a skilled writer ofsupernatural fiction, a master of the macabre who had no peer in the America of his time."According to Curt Wohleber in American Heritage, Lovecraft was "the man who broughtthe . . . thriving genre of supernatural fiction into the twentieth century. . . . Lovecraftabandoned the demons, ghosts, and vampires of his nineteenth-century predecessors infavor of modern horrors inspired by Darwinian evolution and Einsteinian physics."
Born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft grew up in the affluent and intellectualsurroundings of his grandfather's Victorian mansion. Sickly as a child and only able toattend school sporadically, he was an avid reader, fascinated by eighteenth-centuryhistory and Gothic horror stories. He was particularly interested in science and began towrite about it at an early age. Following the death of his grandfather in 1904, Lovecraftand his mother moved from the family mansion to a nearby duplex (his father, a virtualstranger to Lovecraft, had died some years earlier after spending the last years of his lifein a sanitorium). Lovecraft would later relate that, raised by a sensitive and overprotectivemother, he grew up in relative isolation, believing he was unlike other people.
Chronic sickness as a teenager prevented Lovecraft from finishing high school or attendingcollege. He continued his self-education and supported himself by working as a ghostwriterand revisionist--vocations that, though disliked by Lovecraft, would financially sustain himthroughout his life. An admirer of Poe, he had begun writing horror tales but, deemingthem meager efforts, devoted himself to amateur journalism. In addition, he contributednonfiction and poetry to magazines. In 1914 Lovecraft joined the United Amateur PressAssociation, a group of nonprofessional writers who produced a variety of publicationsand exchanged letters, and one year later he began publishing his own magazine, TheConservative. His numerous letters and essays written during this time focus on his deeprespect for scientific truth, his love of the past, and his relative disdain for a present-dayworld populated by non-Anglo-Nordic citizens. Lovecraft developed the belief, to quote

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Darrell Schweitzer in The Dream Quest of H. P. Lovecraft, "that only by clinging to traditioncould we make life worth living amidst the chaos of modern civilization."
Lovecraft resumed writing fiction in 1917 and, at the behest of friends, began submittingstories to Weird Tales, a pulp magazine that would serve as the major publisher ofLovecraft's writings during his lifetime. Critics note that many of his early tales are heavilyinfluenced by Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany. Such stories as "Dagon," "The White Ship,""The Silver Key," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," and "The Cats of Ulthar" stem fromfairy tale tradition, exhibiting rich dreamlike descriptions and imaginary settings. "Thisearly cycle culminated in the extraordinary short novel Lovecraft called The Dream Questof Unknown Kadath," stated Lin Carter in his introduction to Ballantine's edition of thework. The story of protagonist Randolph Carter's search for a magnificent city he onceenvisioned, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath depicts Carter's voyage into the world ofhis dreams, where wondrous landscapes and fantastic creatures exist. "Few more magicalnovels of dream-fantasy exist than this phantasmagoric adventure," declared Carter."[Never have] the fluid and changing landscapes, the twilit and mysterious silences, and thespire-thronged and opulent Oriental cities of the dreamworld been so lovingly explored."
Contrasting to these relatively innocuous stories of fantasy are Lovecraft's tales of horror,remarkable for their bizarre supernatural conceptions rooted in the realism of a NewEngland setting. Lovecraft was captivated by what he considered the ideal beauty of NewEngland's traditional landscape and architecture. However, he was also intrigued by aperceived darker dimension. His stories "The Unnameable" and "The Picture in the House,"for example, depict corruption and superstition that persist in secluded New England areas."The Festival" illustrates unearthly rituals practiced in the picturesque town of Kingsport--a village Lovecraft modeled after Marblehead, Massachusetts, and "Pickman's Model"focuses on a group of ghouls inhabiting modern Boston. Similar to these stories is thenovel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in which the title character engages in magic toresurrect a seventeenth-century ancestor named Curwen. A practitioner of the black arts inSalem, Curwen is determined to inflict his evil on modern Massachusetts and consequentlytakes over the identity of Ward, who is later saved by the family doctor.
The best known of Lovecraft's stories are his later ones centering on the "Cthulhu Mythos,"a term critics use to describe a distinctive universe of landscape, legends, and mythologycompletely of Lovecraft's invention. Like his earlier tales, the Cthulhu Mythos works areinspired by New England locales, but their settings are extensively recast to form Arkham,Innsmouth, and Dunwich, fictional worlds overseen by Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and othergods. These stories, explained Lovecraft as quoted by August Derleth, "are based on thefundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who,

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in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on the outside everready to take possession of this earth again." Tales governed by this principle include "TheNameless City," "The Call of the Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in the Darkness," and At theMountains of Madness.
In addition to writing weird tales, Lovecraft maintained an extensive correspondence andcontinued to generate a number of essays. Through these nonfiction outlets, he expoundedon the aesthetics of supernatural horror fiction and on such philosophies as "mechanisticmaterialism" and "cosmic indifferentism"--the idea that the universe is a purposelessmechanism wherein humankind is largely insignificant. Lovecraft also produced a relativelylarge body of poetry, mostly imitative of eighteenth-century masters. Though he wroteprolifically, only one book, 1936's The Shadow over Innsmouth, realized publication duringhis lifetime. When Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer at the age of forty-six, the bulk of hiswritings remained either scattered in magazines or unpublished.
Later, Lovecraft's friends and fellow writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei broughthis writings to a wide readership. Establishing the publishing house of Arkham expresslyto bring Lovecraft's work into book form, Derleth and Wandrei edited such early collectionsas The Outsider and Others in 1939 and Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943. Numerousvolumes of the horror writer's work have been collected by Arkham and other publish

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1894-1971 Howard P. Lovecraft Collection · PDF fileLovecraft would later relate that, raised by a sensitive and overprotective mother, he grew up in relative isolation, believing