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Post by allthingshorror on Jul 13, 2009 12:41:01 GMT
NEL (1976) As befits a writer of Gothic Horror and fantasy brought up by an over-protective mother who died insane, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) led a strange and complex life. A contradictory blend of 'neuroasthenic invalid and Nordic superman; of arrogant poseur and lonely misfit; of cosmic fantasiste and rigorous scientific materialist; of life hater and lover who never found object worthy of his love,' he was also a gentleman of the old school, a would-be eighteenth century English squire reincarnated in gloomy twentieth-century Providence, Rhode Island.
Unable to find a publisher willing to handle his chilling, twisted fantasies in his own lifetime, Lovecraft's prodigious output has, since his death in poverty and obscurity, achieved critical parity with Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Poe in the classic tradition of American Gothic. Totally incapable of holding down a regular job, this precocious and sensitive genius eked out a meagre living as a ghost writer and literary hack. After a disastrous marriage to the New York writer Sonia Greene, he retreated to a succession of dark, solitary New England houses, his only contact with the outside world coming through his few close friends like robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and a voliminous and often dazzling correspondence.
With frequent quotation from these letters and in Lovecraft's own words, his 'weird, macabre and fantastic stories', this biography tells the tragi-comic story of one of America's last great twentieth century originals.
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