Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. After his father's institutionalization in 1893, he lived affluently until his family's wealth dissipated after the death of his grandfather. Lovecraft then lived with his mother, in reduced financial security, until her institutionalization in 1919. He began to write essays for the United Amateur Press Association, and in 1913 wrote a critical letter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction. He became active in the speculative fiction community and was published in several pulp magazines. Lovecraft moved to New York City, marrying Sonia Greene in 1924, and later became the center of a wider group of authors known as the "Lovecraft Circle". They introduced him to Weird Tales, which would become his most prominent publisher. Lovecraft's time in New York took a toll on his mental state and financial conditions. He returned to Providence in 1926 and produced some of his most popular works, including The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time. He would remain active as a writer for 11 years until his death from intestinal cancer at the age of 46.

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Lovecraft was an atheist. His viewpoints on religion are outlined in his 1922 essay "A Confession of Unfaith". In this essay, he describes his shift away from the Protestantism of his parents to the atheism of his adulthood. Lovecraft was raised by a conservative Protestant family. He was introduced to the Bible and the mythos of Saint Nicholas when he was two. He passively accepted both of them. Over the course of the next few years, he was introduced to Grimms' Fairy Tales and One Thousand and One Nights, favoring the latter. In response, Lovecraft took on the identity of "Abdul Alhazred", a name he would later use for the author of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft experienced a brief period as a Greco-Roman pagan shortly thereafter. According to this account, his first moment of skepticism occurred before his fifth birthday, when he questioned if God is a myth after learning that Santa Claus is not real. In 1896, he was introduced to Greco-Roman myths and became "a genuine pagan".

This came to an end in 1902, when Lovecraft was introduced to space. He later described this event as the most poignant in his life. In response to this discovery, Lovecraft took to studying astronomy and described his observations in the local newspaper.Before his thirteenth birthday, he had become convinced of humanity's impermanence. By the time he was seventeen, he had read detailed writings that agreed with his worldview. Lovecraft ceased writing positively about progress, instead developing his later cosmic philosophy. Despite his interests in science, he had an aversion to realistic literature, so he became interested in fantastical fiction. Lovecraft became pessimistic when he entered amateur journalism in 1914. The Great War seemed to confirm his viewpoints. He began to despise philosophical idealism. Lovecraft took to discussing and debating his pessimism with his peers, which allowed him to solidify his philosophy. His readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken, among other pessimistic writers, furthered this development. At the end of his essay, Lovecraft states that all he desired was oblivion. He was willing to cast aside any illusion that he may still have held.

If, then, it is admitted that Winfield had syphilis, the question is how he contracted it. At this point, of course, we can only indulge in conjecture. McNamara reminds us that the ‘latent period between inoculation and the development of tertiary syphilis is ten to twenty years’, so that Winfield ‘might have been infected as early as eighteen or as late as twenty-eight, well before his marriage at age thirty-five’.13 It is, unfortunately, exactly this period of Winfield’s life about which nothing is known. It is difficult to doubt that Winfield contracted syphilis either from a prostitute or from some other sex partner prior to his marriage, either while attending the military academy or during his stint as a ‘Commercial Traveller’, if indeed that began so early as the age of twenty-eight. (The conjecture that Lovecraft himself might have had congenital syphilis is disproved by the fact that the Wassermann test he was given during his own final illness was negative.)

The course of Winfield’s illness makes horrifying reading. After the first several months the entries become quite sporadic, some- times as many as six months passing before a notation is made. Occasionally there are signs of improvement; sometimes Winfield seems to be failing, and toward the end of 1895 it was thought that he had only days to live. A few times he was permitted to go about the ward or take some air in the yard. His condition began to decline markedly by the spring of 1898. By May he had developed constipation and required an enema every three days. On 12 July he had a temperature of 103° and a pulse of 106, with frequent convulsions. On 18 July he ‘passe[d] from one convulsion into another’ and was pronounced dead the next day.

The trauma experienced by Susie Lovecraft over this excru- ciating period of five years—with doctors ignorant of how to treat Winfield’s illness, and with periods of false hope where the patient seems to recover only to lapse into more serious physical and mental deterioration—can only be imagined. When Susie herself was admitted to Butler Hospital in 1919, her doctor, F. J. Farnell, ‘found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all, abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years’.14 It is no accident that the onset of her ‘abnormality’ dates to 1893.

The critical issue, of course, is what—if anything—Lovecraft himself knew of the nature and extent of his father’s illness. He was two years and eight months old when his father was committed, and seven years and eleven months old when his father died. If he was already reciting poetry at two and a half, he must at least have been aware that something peculiar had happened—why else would he and his mother have moved suddenly back from Auburn- dale to the maternal home in Providence?

It is obvious from Lovecraft’s remarks that he was intentionally kept in the dark about the specific nature of his father’s illness. One wonders, indeed, whether Susie herself knew all its particulars. Lovecraft’s first known statement on the matter occurs in a letter of 1915: ‘In 1893 my father was seized with a complete paralytic stroke, due to insomnia and an overstrained nervous system, which took him to the hospital for the remaining five years of his life. He was never afterward conscious.’15 It need hardly be said at this point that nearly every part of this utterance is false. When Lovecraft refers to a ‘complete paralytic stroke’, either he is remem- bering some deliberate falsehood he was told (i.e., that his father was paralysed), or he has misconstrued the medical term ‘General Paralysis’ or some account of it that he heard. The medical record does confirm that Winfield was overworked (‘Has been actively engaged in business for several years and for the last two years has worked very hard’), and no doubt Lovecraft was told this also; and the remark about Winfield not being conscious may have been the excuse he was given for not visiting his father in the hospital.

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In the autumn of 1927 Frank Belknap Long took it into his head to write a longish short story entitled ‘The Space-Eaters’. This story can be said to have two distinctive qualities: it is the first work to involve Lovecraft as a character (if we exclude whimsies like Edith Miniter’s ‘Falco Ossifracus’, in which the central character, while modelled on Randolph Carter, shares some chracteristics with Lovecraft), and—although this point is somewhat debatable—it is the first ‘addition’ to Lovecraft’s mythos.

To be perfectly honest, ‘The Space-Eaters’ is a preposterous story.

This wild, histrionic account of some entities who are apparently ‘eating their way through space’, are attacking people’s brains, but are in some mysterious manner prevented from overwhelming the earth, is frankly an embarrassment. In this sense, however, it is sadly prophetic of most of the ‘contributions’ other writers would make to Lovecraft’s conceptions.

Whether it is indeed an addition to or extrapolation from Lovecraft’s mythos is a debatable question. The entities in question are never named, and there are no references to any of Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ (only Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth had even been invented at this time, the latter in the unpublished Case of Charles Dexter Ward). What there is, however, is an epigraph (omitted from the first appearance—Weird Tales, July 1928—and many subsequent reprint- ings) from ‘John Dee’s Necronomicon’—i.e., from a purported English translation of Olaus Wormius’s Latin translation of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft made frequent citations of this Dee trans- lation in later stories. This phenomenon would recur throughout Lovecraft’s lifetime: a writer—usually a colleague—either devised an elaboration upon some myth-element in Lovecraft’s stories or created an entirely new element, which Lovecraft then co-opted in some subsequent story of his own. This whole procedure was largely meant in fun—as a way of investing this growing body of myth with a sense of actuality by its citation in different texts, and also as a sort of tip of the hat to each writer’s creations.

Lovecraft, meanwhile, was doing relatively little fiction-writing of his own—he had written nothing since ‘The Colour out of Space’. What he did do, however, on Hallowe’en was to have a spectacular dream about ancient Rome that might serve as the nucleus of a story. He subsequently wrote a long account of the dream to several colleagues—Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, Bernard Austin Dwyer, and perhaps others. One would have liked to see Lovecraft himself write up the dream into an actual story, but he never did anything with it. In 1929 Long asked Lovecraft that he be allowed to use the letter verbatim in a short novel he was writing, and Lovecraft acceded. The result was The Horror from the Hills, published in two parts in Weird Tales (January and February 1931) and later as a book.

Around this time Lovecraft also wrote a history of his mythical book, the Necronomicon, although largely for the purpose of keeping references clear in his own mind. This item bears the title ‘History of the Necronomicon’. On this draft a sentence is added about Dr. Dee’s translation of the volume, leading one to believe that Love- craft had written the bulk of the text prior to seeing Long’s ‘The Space-Eaters’. Since he noted that he had ‘just received’ that story in late September, ‘History of the Necronomicon’ was probably written just before this time.

In late 1927 Lovecraft declared that he had never yet advertised for his revisory services18 (he had evidently forgotten about the ‘Crafton Service Bureau’ ad in L’Alouette in 1924), so that new revision clients would have come to him only by referral. Two such clients made their appearance about this time—Adolphe de Castro and Zealia Brown Reed Bishop.

De Castro (1859–1959), formerly Gustav Adolphe Danziger, was an odd case. He met Ambrose Bierce in 1886 and become an enthusiastic devotee and colleague. A few years later he translated Richard Voss’s short novel Der Mönch des Berchtesgaden (1890–91), and had Bierce revise it; it was published serially as The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1891 and then as a book in 1892. With Bierce and others, Danziger formed the Western Authors Publishing Association, which issued Bierce’s poetry collection Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Danziger’s own short story collection, In the Confessional and the Following (1893). Shortly thereafter, however, Bierce and Danziger had a falling out—mostly over financial wrangling over the profits from the Monk and over Danziger’s management of the publishing company—and although Danziger occasionally met up with Bierce on random subsequent occasions, the two did no further work together.

Bierce went down to Mexico in late 1913, evidently to observe or to participate in the Mexican Civil War. Danziger (now de Castro) lived in Mexico between 1922 and 1925 editing a weekly news- paper. In 1923 he managed to talk with Pancho Villa; Villa main- tained that he threw Bierce out of his camp when Bierce began praising Carranza. Later, according to this account, Bierce’s body was found by the side of a road. De Castro wrote an article in the American Parade for October 1926 entitled ‘Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was’, going on at length about his collaboration on the Monk and discussing his search for Bierce in Mexico.

It was at this point that de Castro came in touch with Lovecraft. With the publicity he was now receiving, he felt the time was right to capitalize on his association with Bierce. He knew Samuel Loveman, and the latter recommended that de Castro write to Lovecraft and seek his help on two projects: a book-length memoir of Bierce, and a revision of the story collection, In the Confessional. Lovecraft agreed to do one story—titled ‘A Sacrifice to Science’ in de Castro’s book and published as ‘The Last Test’ in Weird Tales for November 1928—for which he received $16.00 (de Castro received $175.00 from Weird Tales).

‘The Last Test’ is one of the poorest of Lovecraft’s revisions. It tells the melodramatic story of a doctor, Alfred Clarendon, who is apparently developing an antitoxin for black fever while in charge of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin but who in reality has fallen under the influence of an evil Atlantean magus, Surama, who has developed a disease that ‘isn’t of this earth’ to overwhelm mankind. All this is narrated in the most stiff and pompous manner conceivable. Lovecraft has radically overhauled the plot while yet preserving the basic framework—the California setting, the characters (though the names of some have been changed), the search for a cure to a new type of fever, and (although this now becomes only a minor part of the climax) Clarendon’s attempt to persuade his sister to sacrifice herself. But—aside from replacing the nebulously depicted assistant of Dr Clarendon (‘Dr Clinton’ in de Castro) named Mort with the much more re- doubtable Surama—he has added much better motivation for the characters and the story as a whole. This, if anything, was Lovecraft’s strong point. He has made the tale about half again as long as de Castro’s original; and although he remarked of the latter that ‘I nearly exploded over the dragging monotony of [the] silly thing’,19 Lovecraft’s own version is not without monotony and prolixity of its own.

If it seems unjust that Lovecraft got less than one-tenth of what de Castro was paid, these were the conditions under which Lovecraft operated his revision service: he was at least assured of his fee whether the end result sold or not. (Occasionally, of course, he had difficulty collecting on this fee, but that is a separate matter.) In many cases the revised or ghostwritten tale did not in fact sell. Lovecraft would, in any case, never have wanted to acknowledge such a piece of drivel as ‘The Last Test’, and it is in some ways unfortunate that his posthumous celebrity has resulted in the unearthing of such items and their republication under his name— the very thing he was trying to avoid.