Everyone is a good beaver. In honor of recent Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Ransstr and Stopgame decided to conduct an excursion on the Lovecraft universe.
Today I will talk about Lovecraft itself.
Full name: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Born on August 20, 1890 in the city of Providen, Rhizen, USA. The family was the only child. The parents were called Wilfried Scott Lavkraft and Sarah Susan Phillips Lavkraft, there were English origin, and throughout his life, Howard himself remained enthusiastic Anglophile. The father was a commander (who does not know, these are people, that he was knocking on a house to sell some thing), he always spent more time away from the house and almost had no influence on his offspring.
When the young Howard was three years old, his father was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1898 from the “progressive paralysis of the mentally ill”, the final stage of syphilis. As a result, Lovecraft spent the rest of the years that form the personality under the supervision of his mother and her two unmarried sisters, who completely protected him from hardships and needs of everyday life, but at the same time they considered the boy to be extremely ugly, about which they constantly repeated to him, causing a mental pain to the child. Also, grandfather on the line of his mother, Wyppp Van Buren Phillips, who sheltered the whole family, took part in the upbringing.Howard was a child prodigy – he read poetry by heart at the age of two, and with six he already wrote his.
Soon, Lovecraft began to show obvious signs of “differentness” – at four he could read and spent the clock in the vast library of his grandfather, studying Tom on history and mythology. Grandfather also introduced him to local folk stories and myths, which he later outlined in his memoirs of imaginary New English landscapes Arkham, Danvich and Innsmut.
Lovecraft began to study at the Hope High Skul school in Provice, but, having a poor health that led to long periods of the absence of school, was forced to engage in self -education. He preferred the company of adults, and not peers who did not love him because of the sophisticated nature and not over the years of developed intelligence (some of the readers are probably familiar with such a feeling = 3).
Instead of joining their youthful fun, he developed his own inner world of imagination, trying to compose, and at the age of 14-15 he created his first story “The Beast in the Cave”.
Wyppp Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, after which the family was very impoverished and was forced to move to a smaller house, not far from Dedyshkina. Howard saddened the exit, and he even thought about suicide. Due to the nervous breakdown that happened to him in 1908, he never graduated from school, which he was very ashamed.
By 1914, he presented a Nongamstop-casinos.uk number of articles to the united amateur printed agency and local newspapers, the content of which extended from astronomy and philosophy to occultism and supernatural; Similar topics were devoted to his early work. At this time, he was also carried away by epistolary communication, which became one of the main entertainment of his life. At the same time, he was associated with more than a hundred permanent correspondents, and, in fact, his letters that have reached us significantly exceed his fiction (by one assessment, the total number of letters written by Lovecraft exceeds 100,000).
Nevertheless, only in 1917 the composition was perceived by Lovecraft seriously. The family was forced to leave the house on Angell Street due to financial difficulties, and Lovecraft soon discovered that he was unable to earn a living. (In fact, he spent the best part of his life in a state of financial needs and half -worship, surviving less than $ 15 a week). And the reason of his mother and material conditions quickly fell into decay. In 1919, the mother was placed in the hospital Butler Hospital, where she died in May 1921 after a long illness.
Since childhood, Lovecraft had nightmares, but he couldn’t manage or wake up with him. Creatures with webbed wings, which he called “night mversa”, lifted it into the air and attributed it to the “vile plateau of Lang”. The writer used these experiences in his work. So, the story “Dagon” is one of these dreams, was written in 1917. After awakening, the state of Lovecraft was completely crazy, but he found the strength to record a dream in himself. Re -read it in a few days, he did not change anything.
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“Dagon” was published in “Supernatural Stories” in October 1923, in the year the magazine was released. In the same year, the writer made his first journey to New York to visit the poet Samuel Lavman and meet with Sonya X. Green, the same member of the amateur print agency.
Sonya Green had Ukrainian-Jewish roots and was seven years older than Lovecraft. They got married in 1924 and moved to Brooklyn, New York. After the quiet providence, New York life did not fall in love with Lovecraft. In many ways, his story “He” was his story. A few years later, the couple broke up, although they did not get a divorce. Lovecraft returned to his hometown. Due to the failed marriage, some biographers expressed assumptions about his homosexuality, but Green, on the contrary, called him a “beautiful lover”. Feelings of disgust for the city inspired him to write the story “Horror in Red-Hook”.
Returning to Providence, Lovecraft lived in the “large wooden house of the Victorian era” at 10 Barn-Street, until 1933 (this address is the address of Dr. Willet’s house in the story “Charles Warde Charles”). This period is possibly the most interesting and productive in the life of the writer. He travels a lot around New England, visits Quebec, Philadelphia, Charleston, still conducts active correspondence. The most important works of Lovecraft (sometimes called “senior texts”), starting with the “Call Ktulhu” (1926), were written at this time.
In a letter to Raingardt Kleiner, dated December 4, 1921, he writes:
“Nyarlathotep is a nightmare genuine of myself, creating the first paragraph that was written before I completely woke up. Recently, I felt terribly – all weeks have passed without getting rid of headaches and dizziness, and for a long time for the long time the greatest limit of continuous work … An unusual eyeball was added to my constant misfortunes, which prevented me from reading a small font – a curious tension of my nerves and muscles, in truth, who had the time for me, who had the time for me. And this lasted weeks.
Among this darkness, the nightmare of nightmares arrived – the most realistic and terrible of those that I often experienced, starting from adulthood – whose absolute abomination and extremely oppressive atmosphere I was able, although imperfectly, to reflect in my written fantasy … since I fell into the abyss, I shouted heart -rending, after which the vision disappeared. I was very painful (spasms in my forehead and ringing in my ears), but, obeying an unconscious impulse, I rushed to the light and began to desperately record what I saw, trying to maintain the atmosphere of unprecedented fright. Waking up, I remembered all the events of sleep, but completely lost the unbearable feeling of fear – the true feeling of the presence of a disgusting stranger. From what I just wrote down, I directly belonged to the smallest part, and, after some time, I stopped and doused my head with water. When I examined the text I wrote, I was surprised by his sequence. It consisted of one paragraph of the completed manuscript, later I only changed three words “
In 1936, the writer was discovered by intestinal cancer, a consequence of malnutrition.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937 in Providence (RO RHOULD, USA).
Thank you if you read to the end. I apologize if I have not indicated any episodes from the life of the writer.
