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.

Continue to An Expanding Circle.