![]() However, his desire for knowledge and contemplation on how much there was still left to explore prevented him from doing so.Īt the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. Lovecraft called this one of the darkest times of his life, where he saw no point in living anymore and considered committing suicide. These creatures later appeared in Lovecraft’s fiction.Īfter the death of his grandfather, Lovecraft and his mother would be forced to leave their lavish Victorian home which they lived in, and move to a more modest house. They would snatch him up and carry him through infinite leagues of black air over the towers of dead and horrible cities, until they’d reach a grey void full of needle-like pinnacles of enormous mountains, where they would let him drop. ![]() His mother and aunts wore black dresses to mourn her death, and Lovecraft started having nightmares of beings referred to as night-gaunts. The death of his grandmother, Robie, had a profound effect on him, it sent his family into “a gloom from which it never fully recovered”. He became an avid reader, and he would spent most of his time in his private library. Lovecraft was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven. He became the centre of his entire universe. Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips became a father figure to him, introducing him to classical literature, poetry and weird tales, and ironically even helping him overcome his fear of the dark. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft became overprotective of him, never letting him out of her sight. When he was three years old, his father Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to a mental asylum after a psychotic episode and later died of syphilis. ![]() Lovecraft was an insecure and anxious boy, who suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. It is important then, to know of his biography. The vast, infinite cosmic depth produces an overwhelming emotion that paralyses us.Īlienation, insignificance, fear, anxiety and madness are all recurring themes in Lovecraft’s work, and which he experienced first-hand throughout his life. The novelty of his approach lies in the exploration of new scientific areas in which the possibility of new, unknown beings hiding among the stars arose. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird fiction born in 1890, who introduced “the unknown” as the object of fear. Science has since then helped us explain many of these previously unknown phenomena, but it has also shown us how much still remains unknown in the vastness of the universe. As time went on, they started to seek explanations based on natural principles rather than gods as primary causes, and became the first natural philosophers (or what we know call scientists). And they prayed to these gods for help and protection, because if the gods were unhappy, they would punish them. The Ancient Greeks believed in gods and goddesses who, they thought, had control over the world and of people’s lives. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers an omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind. Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literatureįear of the unknown is something that has been with mankind from the very beginning. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” ![]()
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