H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890 and spent nearly all his life within the orbit of that city. Ill health and family instability interrupted his schooling, but he educated himself through astronomy, chemistry, antiquarian history and an extraordinary correspondence. Tens of thousands of his letters survive; for years, they reached a larger audience than the stories that now define him.

He published mainly in amateur journals and pulp magazines, especially Weird Tales, and earned very little from fiction. The elaborate mythology later called the Cthulhu Mythos was never a tidy system in his hands: it grew through recurring books, names, places and suggestions shared with other writers. At the Mountains of Madness was written in 1931, rejected by Weird Tales, and finally published in Astounding Stories in 1936. He died of intestinal cancer in Providence the following year, poor and little known outside the weird-fiction circle.

The imaginative achievement cannot be separated from the ugliness in the record. Lovecraft wrote openly racist and xenophobic language in letters, essays and stories, and some of his horror depends on fears of immigration, racial mixture and social change. His views altered in some respects during the 1930s but never became defensible. Later writers have expanded, revised and argued with the cosmic scale he made influential, often by placing people he excluded at its centre.