On March 15, 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in his hometown of Providence, R.I., the city in which, save a brief stint in New York, he lived his entire life. The obituary that ran the following day described him as a writer, though was perhaps overgenerous in heralding him as an “author” in its headline.
H.P. Lovecraft certainly wrote, of this there is no doubt. Writing was his hobby and his passion and his mania; he wrote short stories and novels and epistles by the ream. But on the date of his death Lovecraft was not known as an “author,” except perhaps in small, literary circles. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, his first true novel, wouldn’t be published for another six years; the scores of short stories that had appeared in Weird Tales and other pulps seemed destined to be forgotten. And the some-30,000 letters he had written over the years were uncollected, tucked away in the dresser drawers and desktop nooks of his many correspondents.