![]() Beginning at age 6, young Howard was visited by what he called night-gaunts-faceless humanoids with black, rubbery skin, bat-like wings, and barbed tails, who carried off their victims to Dreamland. Lovecraft lived as isolated an existence as he could manage most of his life, and he admitted that “most people only make me nervous” and “that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn’t.” Īs a child, Lovecraft was tormented by night terrors. It’s also possible that he was tormented by the same demons-psychological or spiritual-that led both of his parents to spend the last years of their lives in an asylum. He never completed high school, giving up on his dream of becoming an astronomer, because of what he later called a “nervous breakdown.” It’s possible that whatever intellectual gift Lovecraft was given came at the expense of social skills. Lovecraft was a sickly child who missed so much school in his youth that he was basically self-educated. Lovecraft and his friends, most of whom he knew through volumes of letters-by one estimate, one hundred thousand of them -that some believe were more influential than his published work, wrote to entertain, usually by crafting terrifying tales and conjuring monstrous images of overpowering, inhuman evil. ![]() And because he wrote horror fiction, he wasn’t the kind of writer who got invited to fancy society parties. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, although he wasn’t recognized as such until after his death. ![]()
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