Howard
Phillips
Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(* August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island; † March 15, 1937) was an American writer. He is considered the most important author of fantastic horror literature of the 20th century and influenced numerous successors and imitators with the Cthulhu myth he invented.During Lovecraft's lifetime, only the extensive tale Shadows over Innsmouth was published as a book, while the other texts were published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales.
Only after his death did August Derleth and Donald Wandrei publish several anthologies with Arkham House.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was a traveling salesman. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, was able to trace her family tree back to 1630, when her ancestors had reached Massachusetts Bay to settle. Lovecraft was the first child of his parents, who were both over 30 years old when he came into the world. The house where he was born, at 194 Angell Street (now 454), was demolished in 1961
When Lovecraft was three years old, his father suffered an alleged nervous breakdown in a Chicago hotel and was taken to Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained until his death five years later. The cause of death was given as "general paresis." This term was also used at the time to describe the symptoms of advanced syphilis disease, known as neurolues. It was therefore suspected that Lovecraft's father had suffered from syphilis.
From then on, Lovecraft was raised primarily by his mother, grandfather, and two aunts, and showed early literary talent. He memorized poems as a toddler and began writing his own at the age of six. His grandfather supported this inclination, as well as Lovecraft's interest in the mysterious and fantastic, by giving him books to read such as the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights and children's editions of classics such as the Odyssey and the Iliad.
The grandfather also told Lovecraft self-invented horror stories, partly to the displeasure of his mother, who worried about their possible influence on the boy.Lovecraft had both physical and psychological problems at school age, which is why he attended classes only sporadically until the age of eight, and then was withdrawn from school a year later due to his aggressive and undisciplined behavior.
During this time Lovecraft read widely and developed a great enthusiasm for New England history, chemistry, and astronomy, and from 1899 wrote handwritten journals on these subjects, such as The Scientific Gazette and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, which he distributed among his relatives and friends.
Four years later, at the age of 13, Lovecraft was re-enrolled in school, at Hope Street High School in Providence.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Cosmicism is a literary philosophy founded by H. P. Lovecraft and often used by him to describe his weird fiction. For Lovecraft, the modern worldview, steeped in science and deterministically determined, could no longer offer wonders. Thus, he preferred to place the source of horror in the past or in the depths of outer space. From these two bottomless abysses of time and space cosmic forces rise and invade the everyday life of people who are completely insignificant in comparison with them, usually in the familiar and tranquil environment in which the author grew up. Earth's past holds several races far superior to mankind, some of which still have traces and relics in remote areas; from outer space and from other, "outer" dimensions threaten terrifying cosmic deities, the mere sight of which is enough to make mortal men fall prey to madness.
Lovecraft represented an extremely pessimistic view of history, which negates the anthropocentric position of man and classifies him as one among other historical inhabitants of the planet Earth. Considering its marginal history and the primitive state of civilization, man stands as insignificant as he is vulnerable. Thus Lovecraft's narrative characters are helplessly at the mercy of the encroaching forces and powers of the cosmos. The confrontation with the absolute horror often leads the first-person narrator, who is often chosen because of his apparent authenticity, to madness, death, or suicide. The defenselessness of the individual increases in the narratives in which the Cthulhu myth is elaborated to a cosmic threat to all mankind.
For Michael Koseler, Lars Gustafsson's reflections on the place of man in fantastic art also apply to Lovecraft's worldview. In his essay On the Fantastic in Literature, Gustafsson pointed out the difference between depicting the world as man's natural milieu or as a place where he has landed by chance and whose forces he is so helplessly at the mercy of, as depicted in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prison paintings. Considering how profoundly human history is enclosed by alien cultures in Lovecraft's work, man is a "stranger(s) on earth."
These narratives are precisely constructed and often follow a similar pattern. In the form of confessions, letters, or diaries, they depict the Kafkaesque intrusion of the overpowering stranger into the lives of ordinary people, often triggered by investigations or expeditions that would have been better left undone. In the process, the human characters are exposed to the supernatural almost without protection and often fall into madness when they can no longer close their eyes to the truth.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
In his most successful texts, which include The Rats in the Wall, The Music of Erich Zann, Cthulhu's Call, or Shadows over Innsmouth, Lovecraft forcibly transports the reader into a threatening sphere. The tension is created as the curious narrator (and thus the reader identifying with him) penetrates deeper and deeper into the world of evil. In the "union" with the horrible, which is initially still described as repulsive, is, according to Rein A. Zondergeld, the erotic component is palpable in Lovecraft's stories, who had been an inhibited hermit.
