The Alchemist

The Alchemist, it's a good story in my opinion, here is some information

"The Alchemist" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1908, when Lovecraft was 17 or 18, and first published in the November 1916 issue of the United Amateur.

The story is recounted by the protagonist, Count Antoine de C-, in the first person. Hundreds of years ago, Antoine's noble ancestor was responsible for the death of a dark wizard, Michel Mauvais. The wizard's son, Charles le Sorcier, swore revenge on not only him but all his descendants, cursing them to die on reaching the age of 32.

Creepy I guess, but it's funny.

The Call of Cthulhu - Who is Cthulhu?

Well, Cthulhu sure is a pretty famous Lovecraft's invention so here is some explanation of were did it come and who is it.

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928. Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price claims the irregular sonnet "The Kraken", written in 1830 by Alfred Tennyson, is a major inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's story, as both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.

Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity who first appeared in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu", it us nearly a god in "Cthulhu mythos" and even there are cults that worship Cthulhu, pretty strange I think.

About Weird fiction

What is "Weird fiction"?
-Well, "Weird fiction" is a subgenre of speculative fiction written in the late 19th and early 20th century. H. P. Lovecraft adopted the term from Sheridan Le Fanu and popularized it in his essays. In "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft defines the genre:

"The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space."


Although Lovecraft was one of the few early 20th-century writers to describe his work as "weird fiction," the term has enjoyed a contemporary revival in New Weird fiction.

About Lovecraft

As you can see, Lovecraft was an incredible writer with an incredible imagination. What about his lifestyle? Well, he lived most of his life in a poor state. In his childhood, his family didn't have too much money and they were constantly forced to move to smaller houses. He loved writing so he was doing this a lot of time everyday so he hasn't time to have children!

Lovecraft Bibliography - 3rd part

Scientific works:


The Art of Fusion, Melting Pudling & Casting
Chemistry, 4 volumes
A Good Anaesthetic
The Railroad Review
The Moon
The Scientific Gazette
Astronomy/The Monthly Almanack
The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy
Annals of the Providence Observatory
Providence Observatory Forecast
The Science Library, 3 volumes
Astronomy articles for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner
Astronomy articles for The Providence Tribune
Third Annual Report of the Providence Meteorological Station
Celestial Objects for All
Astronomical Notebook
Astronomy articles for The Providence Evening News
"Bickerstaffe" articles from The Providence Evening News
"Science versus Charlatanry"
"The Falsity of Astrology"
"Astrology and the Future"
"Delavan's Comet and Astrology"
"The Fall of Astrology"
Astronomy articles for The Asheville Gazette-News
Editor's Note to MacManus' "The Irish and the Fairies"
The Truth about Mars
The Cancer of Superstition


Miscellaneous writings (Like Poetry, only 10 but he wrote about 90 of them):


A Task for Amateur Journalists
Departments of Public Criticism
What Is Amateur Journalism?
Consolidations Autopsy
Consolidation's Autopsy
The Amateur Press
The Morris Faction
For President – Leo Fritter
Introducing Mr. Chester Pierce Munroe
The Question of the Day

Lovecraft Bibliography 2nd part

Juvenilia:

The Alchemist
The Beast in the Cave
The Haunted House
John, the Detective
The Little Glass Bottle
The Mysterious Ship
The Mystery of the Grave-Yard
The Noble Eavesdropper
The Picture
The Secret of the Grave
The Secret Cave, or John Lees Adventure


Poetry (Only 10 but he wrote likely 100-150 poems):


De Triumpho Naturae
The Members of the Men's Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence, R.I., to Its President, About to Leave for Florida on Account of His Health
To His Mother on Thanksgiving
To Mr. Terhune, on His Historical Fiction
Providence in 2000 A.D.
New-England Fallen
On the Creation of Niggers
Fragment on Whitman
On Robert Browning
On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight



Philosophical works:

The Crime of the Century
The Renaissance of Manhood
Liquor and Its Friends
More Chain Lightning
Old England and the "Hyphen"
Revolutionary Mythology
The Symphonic Ideal
Editors Note to McGavacks "Genesis of the Revolutionary War"
A Remarkable Document
At the Root
Merlinus Redivivus
Time and Space
Anglo Saxondom
Americanism
The League
Bolshevism
Idealism and Materialism – A Reflection
Life for Humanity's Sake
In Defence of "Dagon"
Nietzscheism and Realism
East and West Harvard Conservatism
The Materialist Today
Some Causes of Self-Immolation
Some Repetitions on the Times
Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms
Objections to Orthodox Communism

Lovecraft Bibliography 1st part

Lovecraft wrote a lot of short stories. A LOT of them so here is a list of them for my bloggers:

Fiction:

The Tomb
Dagon

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
Polaris

Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Memory
Old Bugs
The Transition of Juan Romero
The White Ship
The Doom that Came to Sarnath
The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Street late
The Terrible Old Man

The Cats of Ulthar
The Tree
Celephaïs
From Beyond
The Temple

Nyarlathotep

The Picture in the House
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family Fall
The Nameless City
The Quest of Iranon
The Moon-Bog
Ex Oblivione
The Other Gods
The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
Sweet Ermengarde
Hypnos
What the Moon Brings
Azathoth Fragment
Herbert West–Reanimator
The Hound
The Lurking Fear
The Rats in the Walls
The Festival
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red Hook
He
In the Vault
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
Pickman's Model
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Silver Key
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Descendant Fragment
The Very Old Folk
History of the Necronomicon
The Dunwich Horror
Ibid
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Book Fragment
The Evil Clergyman Letter
The Haunter of the Dark

Collaborations, revisions, and ghost writing:

The Battle that Ended the Century

The Challenge from Beyond

Collapsing Cosmoses

The Crawling Chaos

The Curse of Yig Spring

The Diary of Alonzo Typer

The Disinterment

The Electric Executioner

The Green Meadow

Four o'clock

The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast

The Horror at Martin's Beach

The Horror in the Burying-Ground

The Horror in the Museum

The Last Test

The Man of Stone

Medusa's Coil

The Mound

The Night Ocean

Out of the Aeons

Poetry and the Gods

Relic of a Forgotten World

The Slaying of the Monster

The Sorcery of Aphlar

The Thing in the Moonlight

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Till A’the Seas 

The Trap

The Tree on the Hill

Two Black Bottles

Under the Pyramids

In the Walls of Eryx

Winged Death

Lovecraft Family

His Father

Winfield Scott Lovecraft

In the early 1870s he worked for the James Cunningham, Son & Company carriage factory as a blacksmith. His whereabouts from 1874 to 1889 are not clear, although it has been suggested that he worked in New York City for his cousin, Frederick. In 1889 he began working as a traveling salesman for Providence’s Gorham & Company. He married Sarah Susan Phillips on 12 June 1889 at St. Paul’s in Boston. In 1893 he began having hallucinations while in Chicago on business, and on 25 April he was admitted to Butler Hospital in Providence, diagnosed as having “general paresis” – the tertiary stage of neurosyphilis.

His Mother

Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft

Born in Foster, Providence, Rhode Island, USA on 1857 to Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Robie Alzada Place. Sarah Susan married Winfield Scott Lovecraft and had a child. She passed away on 1921 in Massachusetts, USA.

His Grandfather

Whipple Van Buren Phillips

He was probably the biggest influence in Lovecraft's writing, he encouraged him to write and Whipple read to his grandson classic books from the beginning. When Whipple died Lovecraft was in a emotional breakdown. His grandfather died in March 1904.

His Aunts

Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips

They were Lovecraft's aunts there isn't a lot of information about them, but they were present in Lovecraft's life after all. Lillian died in July 1932 and Annie died in January 1941.

His Wife

Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis (16 March 1883, Ichnia - 26 December 1972) was a one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, a single mother and business woman. She is perhaps best known for being president of the United Amateur Press Association, and her two-year marriage to American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Biography of Lovecraft - "I am providence" 3rd part

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street until 1933. The same address is given as the home of Dr. Willett in Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The period after his return to Providence — the last decade of his life — was Lovecraft's most prolific. In that time he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales), as well as longer efforts, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. He frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghost-writing, including "The Mound", "Winged Death", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" and for Harry Houdini "Under the Pyramids" (also known as "Imprisoned With the Pharaohs"). Lovecraft considered himself a "New Deal Democrat", and was an ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His political views can be considered as "moderately socialist."

Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by his former correspondent Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestine, and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence.

Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument. That was not enough for his fans, so in 1977 a group of them raised the money to buy him a headstone of his own in Swan Point cemetery, on which they had inscribed Lovecraft's name, the dates of his birth and death, and the phrase "I AM PROVIDENCE", a line from one of his personal letters.

Biography of Lovecraft - Hard life to live 2nd part

His grandfather's death in 1904 greatly affected Lovecraft's life, he was fourteen years old so it wasn't easy to assimilate. Mismanagement of his grandfather's estate left his family in a poor financial situation and they were forced to move into much smaller accommodations. In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he himself claimed to have suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate). Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but, from 1908 until 1913, his output was primarily poetry. During that time, he lived a hermit's existence, having almost no contact with anyone but his mother. This changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories of one of the publication's popular writers, Fred Jackson. The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join them in 1914. The UAPA reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays. In 1917, at the prodding of correspondents, he returned to fiction with more polished stories, such as "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The latter was his first professionally-published work, appearing in W. Paul Cook's The Vagrant (November, 1919) and Weird Tales in 1923. Around that time, he began to build up a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch (Psycho), Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series). In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother was committed to Butler Hospital just as her husband had been. Nevertheless, she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained very close until her death on May 24, 1921. A few weeks after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924, and the couple relocated to Brooklyn and moved into her apartment. Lovecraft's aunts may have been unhappy with this arrangement, as they were not fond of Lovecraft being married to a tradeswoman (Greene owned a hat shop). Initially, Lovecraft was enthralled by New York, but soon the couple were facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both, so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to dislike New York life intensely. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he employed in the short story "The Horror at Red Hook".

A few years later, Lovecraft and his wife, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed. He returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.

Biography of Lovecraft - A story to tell 1st part

H.P.Lovecraft was born in August 20, 1890 in Providence (Capital of Rhode Island in United States) at 9:00 a.m. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft (His father) and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft (His mother). When Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a Chicago hotel room while on a business trip. His father was taken back to Providence and placed in the Butler Hospital, where he remained until his death in 1898. Lovecraft assumed that his father died in a paralysis condition brought by a nervous exhaustion due to overwork. After his father's hospitalization, Lovecraft was raised by his mother, his two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Early at the age of three, Lovecraft was a prodigy reciting poetry and writing complete poems at the age of six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as One thousand and one nights and Bulfinch's Age of Fable. Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child. Due to his sickly condition, he barely attended school until he was eight years old, and then was withdrawn after a year. During this period, he read a lot and became specially enamored of astronomy and chemistry and then he produced several hectographed publications with "The Scientific Gazette". Four years later, he returned to school at Hope High School (Rhode Island). It's believed that then he has suffered a rare paranomasia disorder and nightmares, most of them probably inspired him later in his writing.

Who is H.P.Lovecraft?

H.P.Lovecraft (Howard Phillips Lovecraft) was an important American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, specially the subgenre known as weird fiction. He wrote a lot of fictional stories, poetry philosophical works, scientific works and miscellaneous writings. Lovecraft really loved writting.