page_title: H. P. Lovecraft
section_title: Early life and family tragedies
hierarchical_section_title: H. P. Lovecraft / Biography / Early life and family tragedies
caption_attribution_description: English: This is an 1892 photograph of Lovecraft's family.
context_page_description: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird fiction and horror fiction, who is known for his creation of what became the Cthulhu Mythos.
  Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. He was born into affluence, but his family's wealth dissipated soon after the death of his grandfather. In 1913, he wrote a critical letter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction. During the interwar period, he wrote and published stories that focused on his interpretation of humanity's place in the universe. In his view, humanity was an unimportant part of an uncaring cosmos that could be swept away at any moment. These stories also included fantastic elements that represented the perceived fragility of anthropocentrism.
  Lovecraft was at the center of a wider body of authors known as "The Lovecraft Circle". This group wrote stories that frequently shared details among them. He was also a prolific writer of letters. He maintained a correspondence with several different authors and literary proteges. According to some estimates, he wrote approximately 100,000 letters over the course of his life.
context_section_description: Lovecraft was born in his family home on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan [née Phillips] Lovecraft. Susie's family was of substantial means at the time of their marriage, her father, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, being involved in business ventures.
  In April 1893, after a psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel, Winfield was committed to Butler Hospital in Providence. Though it is not clear who reported Winfield's prior behavior to the hospital, medical records indicate that he had been "doing and saying strange things at times" for a year before his commitment. Winfield spent five years in Butler before dying in 1898. His death certificate listed the cause of death as general paresis, a term synonymous with late-stage syphilis. Throughout his life, Lovecraft maintained that his father fell into a paralytic state, due to insomnia and being overworked, and remained that way until his death. It is not known whether Lovecraft was simply kept ignorant of his father's illness or whether his later remarks were intentionally misleading.
  After his father's hospitalization, Lovecraft resided in the family home with his mother, his maternal aunts Lillian and Annie, and his maternal grandparents Whipple and Robie. According to the accounts of family friends, Susie doted on the young Lovecraft to a fault, pampering him and never letting him out of her sight. Lovecraft later recollected that after his father's illness his mother was "permanently stricken with grief." Whipple became a father figure to Lovecraft in this time, Lovecraft noting that his grandfather became the "centre of my entire universe." Whipple, who traveled often on business, maintained correspondence by letter with the young Lovecraft who, by the age of three, was already proficient at reading and writing. He encouraged the young Lovecraft to have an appreciation of literature, especially classical literature and English poetry. In his old age he helped raise the young H. P. Lovecraft and educated him not only in the classics, but also in original weird tales of "winged horrors" and "deep, low, moaning sounds" which he created for his grandchild's entertainment. The exact sources of Phillips' weird tales have not been identified. Lovecraft himself guessed that they originated from classic Gothic novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin. It was in this period that Lovecraft was introduced to some of his earliest literary influences such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Doré, One Thousand and One Nights, a gift from his mother, Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
  While there is no indication that Lovecraft was particularly close to his grandmother Robie, her death in 1896 had a profound effect. By his own account, it sent his family into "a gloom from which it never fully recovered." His mother's and aunts' wearing of black mourning dresses "terrified" him, and it is at this time that Lovecraft, approximately five-and-a-half years old, started having nightmares that would inform his later writing. Specifically, he began to have recurring nightmares of beings he termed "night-gaunts"; their appearance he credited to the influence of Doré's illustrations, which would "whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents." Thirty years later, night gaunts would appear in Lovecraft's writing.
  Lovecraft's earliest known literary works began at age seven with poems restyling the Odyssey and other mythological stories. Lovecraft has said that as a child he was enamored of the Roman pantheon of gods, accepting them as genuine expressions of divinity and foregoing his Christian upbringing. He recalled, at five years old, being told Santa Claus did not exist and retorting by asking why "God is not equally a myth." At the age of eight, he took a keen interest in the sciences, particularly astronomy and chemistry. He also examined the anatomy books available to him in the family li
caption: Sarah, Howard, and Winfield Lovecraft in 1892.
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