Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) lived almost all his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Both his parents were committed to Butler Hospital, a psychiatric institution, where they died. He published mainly in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and wrote tens of thousands of letters. Little known at his death from intestinal cancer, he became through posthumous publication one of the most influential writers of horror, though his work is marred by explicit racial prejudice.
1928 (title story) · Early 20th Century · Short Stories
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
