His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman for 
        Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence. When Lovecraft was three 
        his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and 
        was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years 
        before dying on July 19, 1898. 
             With the death of his father, the upbringing of the boy fell to 
        his mother, his two aunts, and especially his grandfather, the 
        prominent industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Lovecraft was a 
        precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age  two, reading at age 
        three, and writing at age six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was 
        for the 'Arabian Nights', which he read by the age of five; it was at 
        this time that he adopted the pseudonym of 'Abdul Alhazred,' who later 
        became the author of the mythical 'Necronomicon'. The next year, 
        however, his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek 
        mythology, gleaned through 'Bulfinch's Age of Fable' and through 
        children's versions of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'. Indeed his earliest 
        surviving literary work, 'The Poem of Ulysses' (1897), is a paraphrase 
        of the 'Odyssey' in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. 
             But Lovecraft had by this time already discovered weird fiction, 
        and his first story, the non-extant 'The Noble Eavesdropper,' may date 
        to as early as 1896. His interest in the weird was fostered by his 
        grandfather, who entertained Lovecraft with off-the-cuff weird tales 
        in the Gothic mode. 
             As a boy Lovecraft was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent 
        illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. His attendence at 
        the Slater Avenue School was sporadic, but Lovecraft was soaking up 
        much information through independent reading. At about the age of 
        eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. He began 
        to produce hectographed journals, 'The Scientific Gazette' 
        (1899-1907), and 'The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy' (1903-1907), 
        for distribution amongst his friends. 
             When he entered Hope Street High School, he found noth his 
        teachers and peers congenial and encouraging,and he developed a number 
        of long-lasting friendships with boys of his age. Lovecraft's first 
        appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an 
        astronomical matter to 'The Providence Sunday Journal'. Shortly 
        thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for 'The 
        Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner', a rural paper; he later wrote columns for 
        'The Providence Tribune' (1906-1908) and the 'Providence Evening News' 
        (1914-1918), as well as 'The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News' (1915). 
             In 1904 the death of Lovecraft's grandfather, and the subsequent 
        mismanagement of his property and affairs, plunged Lovecraft's family 
        into severe financial difficulties. Lovecraft and his mother were 
        forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped 
        quarters. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace, and 
        apparently contemplated suicide, as he took long bicycle rides and 
        looked wistfully at the watery depths of the Barrington River. But the 
        thrill of learning banished those thoughts. In 1908, however, just 
        prior to his graduation from high school, he suffered a nervous 
        breakdown that compelled him to leave school without a diploma; this 
        fact, and his subsequent failure to enter Brown University, were 
        sources of great shame to Lovecraft in later years, in spite of the 
        fact that he was one of the most formidable autodidacts of his time. 
        From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a vitual hermit, doing little save 
        pursuing his astronomical interests and his poetry writing. During 
        this whole period Lovcecraft was thrown into an unhealthy close 
        relationship with his mother, who was still suffering from the traume 
        of her husband's illness and death, and who developed a pathological 
        love-hate relationship with her son. 
             Lovecraft emerged from his mermitry in a peculiar way. Having 
        taken to reading the early 'pulp' magazines of the day, he became so 
        incensed at the insipid love stories of one Fred Jackson in 'The 
        Argosy' that he wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson. This 
        letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from 
        Jackson's defenders. Lovecraft engaged in a heated debate in the 
        letter column of 'The Argosy' and its associated magazines, 
        Lovecraft's responses being almost always in rollicking heroic 
        couplets reminiscent of Dryden and Pope. This controversy was noted by 
        Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association 
        (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from around the country who wrote 
        and published their own magazines. Daas invited Lovecraft to joins the 
        UAPA, and Lovecraft did so in early 1914. Lovecraft published thirteen 
        issues of his own paper, 'The Conservative' (1915-1923), as well as 
        contributing poetry and essays voluminously to other journals. Later 
        Lovecraft became President and Official Editor of the UAPA, and also 
        served briefly as President of the rival National Amateur Press 
        Association (NAPA). 
             This entire experience may well have saved Lovecraft from a life 
        of unproductive reclusiveness; as he himself once said: "In 1914, when 
        the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close 
        to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be...With the advent 
        of the United I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of 
        existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a shpere in 
        which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the 
        first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a 
        little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening world." 
        Lovecraft's mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating, 
        suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler 
        Hospital, whence, like her husband, she would never emerge. Her death 
        on May 24, 1921, however was the result of a bungled gall bladder 
        operation. Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of his mother, but in a 
        few weeks had recovered enough to attend an amateur journalism 
        convention in Boston on July 4, 1921. 
             It was on this occasion that he first met the woman who would 
        become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian Jew seven years 
        Lovecraft's senior, but the two seemed, at least initially, to find 
        themselves very congenial. Lovecraft visited Sonia in her Brooklyn 
        apartment in 1922, and the news of their marriage on March 3, 1924, 
        was not entirely a surprise to their friends; but it may have been to 
        Lovecraft's two aunts, Lilian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, 
        who were notified only by letter after the ceremony had taken place. 
        Lovecraft moved into Sonia's apartment in Brooklyn, and initial 
        prospects for the couple seemed good; Lovecraft had gained a foothold 
        as a professional writer by the acceptance of several of his early 
        stories by 'Weird Tales', the celebrated pupl magazine founded in 
        1923; Sonia had a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue in New York. 
             But troubles descended upon the couple almost immediately: the 
        hat shop went bankrupt, Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit a 
        companion magazine to 'Weird Tales', which would have necessitated his 
        move to Chicago, and Sonia's health gave way, forcing her to spend 
        time in a New Jersey sanitarium. Lovecraft attempted to secure work, 
        but few were willing to hire a thirty-four-year-old-man with no job 
        experience. On January 1, 1925, Sonia went to Cleveland to take up a 
        job there, and Lovecraft moved into a single apartment near the seedy 
        Brooklyn area called Red Hook. 
            Although Lovecraft had many friends in New York, he became 
        increasingly depressed by his isolation and the masses of 'foreigners' 
        in the city. His fiction turned from the nostalgic to the bleak and 
        misanthropic. Finally, in early 1926, plans were made for Lovecraft to 
        return to the Providence he missed so keenly. But where did Sonia fit 
        into these plans? No one seemed to know, least of all Lovecraft. 
        Although he continued to profess his affection for her, he acquiesced 
        when his aunts barred her from coming to Providence to start a 
        business; their nephew could not be tainted by the stigma of a 
        tradeswoman wife. The marriage was essentially over, and a divorce in 
        1929 was inevitable. 
             When Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, it was 
        not to bury himself away as he had done in the 1908-1913 period; 
        rather, the last ten years of his life were the time of his greatest 
        flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. His life was 
        relatively uneventful, he traveled widely to various antiquarian sites 
        around the eastern seaboard, Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, 
        Charleston, St.Augustine; he wrote his greatest fiction, from 'The 
        Call of Cthulhu' (1926) to 'At the Mountains of Madness' (1931) to 
        'The Shadow out of Time' (1934-1935; and he continued his prodigiously 
        vast correspondence, but Lovecraft had found his niche as a New 
        England writer of weird fiction and as a general man of letters. He 
        nurtured the careers of many young writers (August Derleth, Donald 
        Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became concerned with 
        political and economic issues, as the Great Depression led him to 
        support Roosevelt and become a moderate socialist; and he continued 
        absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to 
        literature to history to achitecture. 
             The last two or three years of his life, however, were filled 
        with hardship. In 1932 his bloved aunt, Mrs. Clark, died, and he moved 
        into quarters, right behind the John Hay Library, with his other aunt 
        Mrs. Gamwell in 1933. His later stories, increasingly lengthy and 
        comples, became difficult to sell, and he was forced to support 
        himself largely through the 'revision' or ghost-writing of stories, 
        poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936 the suicide of Robert E. 
        Howard, one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and 
        saddened. By this time the illness that would cause his own death, 
        cancer of the intestine, had already progressed so fat that little 
        could be done to treat it. Lovecraft attempted to carry on in 
        increasing pain through the winter of 1936-37, but was finally 
        compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on March 10, 1937, 
        where he died five days later. He was buried on March 18 at the 
        Phillips family plot at Swan Point Cemetery. 
 

Source:  After S. T. Joshi.