It's the birthday of science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1890). He had a nervous breakdown and never graduated from high school, and many people today have never heard of him, but he was famous in his day, and he went on to influence a whole generation of science fiction and horror writers, including Stephen King.
He is most famous for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, an alternate universe. It was taken up by other writers, and there are now thousands of stories written in the Cthulhu Mythos, although H.P. Lovecraft never expected anything of the sort — to him, it was only a setting for his fiction.
H.P. Lovecraft developed a philosophy called "cosmicism," which says, more or less, that there is no divine being, no divine purpose, and that the human race is totally insignificant in the larger scheme of things. There is only the great horror of the cosmos.
Photo Lifted from Metroactive Books
Text lifted from The Writer's Almanac
2 comments:
very cool. my boyfriend loves hp lovecraft!
So does Husband, that's how I came to love him too. In a creepy, otherworldly kind of way, not the same way I love Johnny Depp. But close.
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