Howard Phillips Lovecraft's Biography(Books)(Photos)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – march 15,
1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science

With the Necronomicon there was a difference, however. Other

fiction, known then simply as weird fiction.

writers began to treat it as if it really did exist, quoting
from the nonexistent work and even composing large sections

HP Lovecraft was one of the early exponents of horror
fantasy, best known for the series of works known

of it; several Necronomicons were in fact later published,
by hoaxers including L. Sprague De Camp and Colin Wilson.

collectively as the Cthulhu Mythos. He peppered his books
with references to an occult work called The Necronomicon,

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic

and, as his fame grew, he was besieged by readers asking
where they could find a copy of it. But the truth was that

horror, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human
minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those

Lovecraft had invented the book and its title. He wrote in a
letter of 1937: ‘the name Necronomicon (necros, corpse;

who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with
sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his

nomos, law; eikon, image = An Image of the Law of the Dead)
occurred to me in the course of a dream, although the

Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction
featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well

etymology is perfectly sound.’ So the title came before
everything else, and substituted, perfectly reasonably, for

as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites
and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and

the work itself.

cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment,
Romanticism, and Christian humanism. Lovecraft's

This is a game that many writers have played, and the
history of literature is full of references to books that

protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of
traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing

don’t, in fact, exist. Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Dorothy
L Sayers, Frank Herbert, Martin Amis, Arthur Conan Doyle and

the horror of ultimate reality.

many, many others have all joined in. Some of my favourite
fictional titles are from Kurt Vonnegut, who, as Kilgore

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life,
his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now

Trout, writes non-existent works such as The Barring-Gaffner
of Bagnialto, or This Year's Masterpiece, which are usually

commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror
writers of the 20th century, who together with Edgar Allan

accompanied by helpful plot summaries. Perhaps the most
notorious fictional-book-inventors have been writers such as

Poe has exerted "an incalculable influence on succeeding
generations of writers of horror fiction". Stephen King has

Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges; naturally enough, since
their writing often draws attention to literature as itself

called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest
practitioner of the classic horror tale.