Contributed by Dustin Wright on Monday July 9, 2007 09:42AM

H.P. Lovecraft

An Introduction to The Gentleman Scholar.

The Eternal H.P. Lovecraft

Over the last 25 years, Chaosium has developed a deep respect for this Providence born gentleman-scholar. We have made it our goal to ensure that he is never forgotten. It has been our honor and pleasure to introduce hundreds of new readers to his stories each year. With your permission and kind support, we will continue to do so far into the future until The Stars Are Right, and the Great Old Ones rise again.

Chaosium has been publishing Call of Cthulhu fiction based upon the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle of friends since 1993. We've been publishing the Call of Cthulhu RPG based upon his shared vision since 1981.

H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos

IN A 46-year lifetime H. P. Lovecraft wrote or collaborated on more than 65 stories, penned dozens of articles and essays, and hundreds of poems, and wrote perhaps as many as 100,000 letters. Occasionally referring to his Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles, to the best of anyone's knowledge Lovecraft never used the term Cthulhu Mythos.

Although nearly all his tales can be linked by common references to people, places, and things, for the most part they lack a true central structure or anything resembling a preconceived history and mythology. It was not until late in Lovecraft's career (and then probably only at the urging of some of his younger correspondents) that he began to integrate into his later stories some of the creations found in his earliest tales. In "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931) we find the deep one hybrids worshiping Dagon, a creature not mentioned since the story "Dagon" (1917), his second piece of adult fiction.

Similarly, the fictional city of Arkham and its Miskatonic University, first used as backdrops in "The Picture in the House" (1920) and "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1921-1922), are finally developed in his later stories beginning with "The Dunwich Horror" (1928) and continuing through "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930), "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933). "At the Mountains of Madness" (1931) and "The Shadow Out of Time" (1934-1935) contain detailed histories of prehuman Earth describing the different alien beings that had in the past visited and colonized the planets. Some of these races, such as the fungi from Yuggoth and the Cthulhu spawn, were from earlier stories and were carefully integrated into these late-devised histories.

The dreaded Necronomicon, one of the Lovecraft's most famous creations, undergoes a gradual evolution. First mentioned in "The Hound" (1922), it is here attributed to an Abdul Alhazred, an Arab poet mentioned in an earlier story, "The Nameless City" (1921). Alhazred was, in fact, the boyhood persona of a five-year-old HPL, his youthful imagination inflamed by his grandfather's copy of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

The term Cthulhu Mythos is generally attributed to August Derleth, a young writer and early fan of Lovecraft who later founded Arkham House publishers, dedicated to keeping in print the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft. Fans and scholars have since debated the definition of this term, argued the Cthulhu Mythos content of various of Lovecraft's tales, constructed experimental pantheons of gods and deities, postulated histories, and made vain attempts to explain all the facets of the literary Mythos.

In the meantime dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers both professional and amateur have continued to write Mythos-inspired stories expanding upon Lovecraft's original concepts while simultaneously developing their own, sometimes inconsistent with HPL and rarely consistent with each other. For the purposes of Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium has incorporated most of Lovecraft's creations, as well as those of other authors, in a loosely cast Mythos that allows Keepers of Call of Cthulhu to add or delete particular creatures and conceptions as they will.

H.P. Lovecraft: Influences

Lovecraft enjoyed but little success during his lifetime. Although he early attracted a small core of avid fans (many of them writers themselves) he never achieved more than semi-regular publication in the pulp magazines of the day. Never as popular as writers like Seabury Quinn, Lovecraft earned most of his always meager income revising and rewriting the works of others, even ghostwriting "Under the Pyramids" (1924) for escape artist Harry Houdini. It was through publication in amateur magazines and later in Weird Tales that Lovecraft was to come into contact with other authors of the macabre tale.

These contacts included already accomplished professionals like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, as well as talented young writers like Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and a teenage Robert Bloch. As fate would have it, Lovecraft would make the personal acquaintance of only a few of these people, but long-standing friendships were maintained through voluminous correspondence - long, discursive letters filled with lengthy discussions of literature, philosophy, and science. Before his death this circle of correspondents would include such recognizable names as Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, J. Vernon Shea, E. Hoffman Price, and Fritz Lieber. Some of these letters are collected in the five Arkham House volumes and others are published by Necronomicon Press. Brown University, in Lovecraft's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, maintains a catalogued Lovecraft collection with thousands more.

Lovecraft's fictional worlds and histories were often discussed, as were the worlds created by Smith and other writers. It was not long before Smith and Lovecraft carried over this sharing of ideas into their fiction, referring to each other's creations in their stories. It was Smith who gave birth to such deities as Tsathoggua, Atlach-Nacha, and Abhoth, and who created the magical tome, the Book of Eibon. It was Smith's magical, prehistoric Hyperborea that Lovecraft frequently referred to in his tales. This idea was soon picked up by other authors. Robert E. Howard (whose most famous creation is still Conan the barbarian) created the dreaded Unausprechlichen Kulten and the mad poet Justin Geoffrey, author of the terrible People of the Monolith. These were also incorporated into Lovecraft's stories, along with references to Howard's prehistoric Cimmeria.

The young Robert Bloch provided the blasphemous books De Vermiis Mysteriis and the Cultes des Goules as well as the interstellar and invisible star vampire that devoured a thinly disguised HPL in Bloch's "Shambler from the Stars" (1935). Bloch's creations were quickly absorbed by Lovecraft, who also revenged his "murder" by dispatching protagonist Robert Blake in the "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936). Long-time friend Frank Belknap Long brought to the collection both the hounds of Tindalos and the Space-Eaters, as well as Chaugnar Faugn, who appeared in "The Horror in the Hills", a story by Long based on one of Lovecraft's many vivid dreams.

August Derleth added the most to the now-growing collection of Great Old Ones and alien races. Continuing to write new Cthulhu Mythos stories long after Lovecraft's death in 1937, he created, among others, Cthugha, the Tcho-Tcho people, Ithaqua, and the sand-dwellers. Basing a number of his tales in Lovecraft's fictional towns of Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, he introduced such characters as Dr. Shrewsbury, who, with the use of magicks, voyaged through space to visit the vast alien library circling the star Celaeno. Although many disagree with Derleth's interpretations (his desire to create a pantheon of good gods based on Lovecraft's Nodens, and his attempts to define Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep as elementals) none will deny this man's tireless efforts in keeping the works of Lovecraft in print and available to the public in the decades following HPL's death.

One of Derleth's favorite additions to the Mythos was Hastur, a great being supposedly trapped beneath the Lake of Hali near the city Carcosa on a planet circling the star Aldebaran. Although briefly mentioned by Lovecraft in early tales, these were actually the creations of Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), American journalist and early exponent of the weird tale. Bierce was an early influence on HPL, as were a number of other writers. His favorite author was always Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and Poe's influence can be clearly seen in some of Lovecraft's first adult fiction. "The Outsider" (1921) perhaps most closely emulates Poe's style and subject matter. Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was another early influence; his story "The Great God Pan" (1894) is very similar in theme to Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror." Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) also left his mark on Lovecraft. A mysterious play, The King in Yellow, figures in some of Chambers' stories and probably inspired Lovecraft to create the Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the other tomes of eldritch lore for which his tales are famous. It was Chambers who first borrowed from Bierce the Lake of Hali and Carcosa, perhaps inspiring Lovecraft to attempt transpositions.

Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) was probably Lovecraft's strongest contemporary influence. It was Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana (1905) that encouraged Lovecraft to write several dream-based stories and first provided him with the idea of an artificial pantheon of gods. Algernon Blackwood, another contemporary admired by HPL, drew upon Native American legends for the version of the Wendigo later adapted into the Mythos by August Derleth, which is there called Ithaqua.

H.P. Lovecraft: The Man

Although chronic nervous disorders prevented Lovecraft from regular attendance at school, he was a precocious child and an avid reader. His father institutionalized when Lovecraft was only three, he and his mother moved into the house owned by his maternal grandfather. It was in the library of Grandfather Whipple that Lovecraft first discovered the Arabian Nights, the myths of Greece and Rome, and Edgar Alan Poe. He wrote his first story, "The Little Glass Bottle", at the age of six, about the time he had his first dreams about the terrible, faceless nightgaunts (throughout his life he had vivid dreams). It was also through this library that Lovecraft developed a taste for Georgian thought and literature that would remain with him throughout his life.

But Lovecraft, who would later describe himself as a "mechanist materialist", was also attracted to the sciences. In 1899 he began publishing a small journal called the Scientific Gazette, followed shortly thereafter by the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy. These small, hectographed publications were sold door to door by a bicycle-mounted HPL. At age thirteen, Lovecraft's beloved grandfather died. His father had already passed away, succumbing to his illness in 1898, still confined to Butler Hospital. A series of business failures had depleted the Whipple family fortune, forcing Lovecraft's mother and aunts to sell the family home and move to smaller quarters. This was a great blow to Lovecraft. Another attack of nerves led to his withdrawal from high school in 1905 and again in 1908. Lovecraft, two and a half years short of graduation, never returned.

Lovecraft never held a job, supporting himself on the dwindling family fortune and by what little he could earn as a ghostwriter and revisionist. Always the aristocrat, he was throughout his life to remain torn between the professional writer's desire for success and money and the detached, amateur gentleman's desire to reach for aesthetic goals unfettered by commercial demands. Despite this, his first attempts to sell his fiction met with unqualified success, the editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird, accepting the first five stories sent to him by Lovecraft. His stories appeared in nine of eleven issues published between late 1923 and early 1925.

When the editorship of Weird Tales passed to the hands of Farnsworth Wright, Lovecraft's fortunes changed. Wright, an able editor, possessed a blind spot regarding Lovecraft's work and now HPL more often met with rejection than success. Stories now considered classics, such as "The Call of Cthulhu", were only published after meeting repeated rejections from Weird Tales. His half-hearted attempts to provide what Wright demanded of commercial fiction were only partially successful. Wright rejected both "At the Mountains of Madness " and "The Shadow Out of Time", now-famous stories that were eventually printed by Astounding Stories. The superb "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" didn't see publication until years after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft, crushed by the repeated rejections, began refusing to submit his stories, and "Dreams in the Witch House" only saw print because August Derleth secretly submitted it to Wright, urging him to accept it.

H.P. Lovecraft: An Expanding Circle

Ironically, it was during this time that HPL was doing the bulk of his professionally published revision work, much of it no less than actual ghostwriting. Lovecraft might provide a nearly complete text of a story based on a few root ideas supplied by the "author". Stories such as Zealia Bishop's "The Curse of Yig" and "The Mound", and Hazel Heald's "The Horror in the Museum" and "Out of the Aeons" were in fact 90% or more the product of H.P. Lovecraft. While these stories were quickly accepted by Wright, Lovecraft's work under his own name continued to be rejected.

The practice of trading deities, books, and themes from one writer's stories to another was in full swing at this time, and Lovecraft seemed to join in the game with his revision tales. Bishop's two stories are set in the American southwest and here we find Lovecraft's Cthulhu and Smith's Tsathoggua, along with the introduction of Yig. All three are worshiped by a heretofore unguessed-at race of subterranean humans. "Out of the Aeons" introduces a new deity, Ghatanothoa, described through the vehicle of Robert E. Howard's Nameless Cults and linking both to Lovecraft's own fungi from Yuggoth. "The Horror in the Museum" introduces us to dimensional shamblers and a Great Old One known as Rhan-Tegoth.

The 1940s and '50s saw a quiet expansion of the Mythos. Robert Bloch and James Wade added a few stories to the canon, but it was August Derleth who contributed the most, producing a number of original tales as well as posthumous collaborations based on Lovecraft's story notes. It was not until 1964 that the appearance of a young Britisher named Ramsey Campbell heralded a renewed interest in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Encouraged by August Derleth, Campbell's first published collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Less Welcome Tenants (1964), was a series of Lovecraft-inspired pastiches set in England's Severn Valley. These stories described a number of different beings, races, and histories similar to, but distinct from Lovecraft's. His most famous Mythos creations include Y'golonac, Glaaki, the insects from Shagghai, and a host of other creatures and god-like beings (see Made In Goatswood). 1971 saw the emergence of another Britisher, Brian Lumley, who brought to the Mythos the underground chthonians, the mysterious G'harne Fragments, and the modern-day sorcerer Titus Crow (see Singers of Strange Songs).

Numerous other contemporary contributors directly influenced by Lovecraft include Gary Myers, Basil Copper, T.E.D. Klein, David Drake, and Thomas Ligotti. Many others, such as Stephen King, have made special contributions to anthologies of new Mythos tales. Few writers of modern horror fiction can claim there is no Lovecraft influence in their work.

Lovecraft died in near obscurity in March of 1937, at the age of 46 a victim of Bright's disease and virulent cancer. His mother had died in 1921 after two years' confinement in the same institution where his father had died. A brief, two-year marriage accompanied by residence in New York proved disastrous, though divorce was never made final, and in 1926 Lovecraft had fled home to Providence to live out his years a bachelor, sharing quarters with two aunts. These last years saw a reduced output of fiction but it was during this period that he produced some of his most memorable tales. He also found time to travel, visiting places that tickled his antiquarian heart: Maine, Philadelphia, Quebec, St. Augustine, Charlotte, New Orleans, Salem, and Nantucket. Traveling by bus, sleeping in YMCAs, and eating crackers, cheese, and canned beans, Lovecraft was able to indulge his personal tastes for the old, the antique, and the decaying.

? Plenty of evidence exists to show that Lovecraft was, by any assessment, an odd individual. Predisposed to hypochondria and a premature pose of old age, for much of his life he was committed to social and artistic views more suitable to centuries past than the one he lived in. Allergic to cold and repulsed by seafood, he was also a scientist and a philosopher possessed of an inquiring mind and sharp wit. Most who came to know him during his lifetime were left profoundly changed by his friendship. Encouraged and enlightened by his erudition and no- nonsense philosophies, many went on to achieve fame far greater than their mentor ever enjoyed during his lifetime. He has the same effect today, generations after his death. His name is better known than ever and those who discover him, whether through his stories, through films, games, comics, or trading cards, find themselves as fascinated by his bizarre creations and nightmare worlds as were his contemporaries so many years ago.

Dustin O'Chaosium

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