Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)

Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890  in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. When Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic at a hotel in Chicago where he was on a business trip. He was brought back to Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained for the rest of his life. His death was from tertiary syphilis. He died when Lovecraft was eight years old. Lovecraft was thereafter raised by his mother, two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, with whom Lovecraft and his female relatives lived until Phillips' death. Lovecraft was a child prodigy, reciting poetry at age two and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904 and Lovecraft was deeply affected by the loss and even contemplated suicide for a time. Lovecraft wrote fiction as a youth, but then set it aside for some time in favour of poetry and essays, before returning to fiction in 1917 with more polished stories such as "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The latter was his first professionally published work, appearing in Weird Tales in 1923. Also around this time he began to build up his huge network of correspondents. . He married with Sonia Green in 1924, and the couple moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.  Lovecraft himself came to intensely dislike New York life.  Lovecraft's stay in New York came to be marred by financial difficulty, because his efforts to find employment failed. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear. Back in Providence, later of his divorce, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street until 1933. (This is the address given as the home of Dr. Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.) The period after his return to Providence—the last decade of his life—was Lovecraft's most prolific. During this time period he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghostwriting, including "The Mound", "Winged Death", and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer".