Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Rhode Island in 1890. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, died in 1898. Winfield spent the last few years of his life in a psychiatric hospital following a psychotic episode caused by syphilis. Lovecraft was raised by his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. There was a history of psychiatric illnesses in Lovecraft’s family, and he experienced a mental health crisis in 1908. He did not graduate from high school or attend college, but he wrote extensively throughout his lifetime. In 1924, Lovecraft married a woman named Sonia Haft Greene. The couple had a tumultuous relationship and divorced in 1929. Between 1926 and 1936, Lovecraft was a prolific writer. He died of intestinal cancer in 1937 at age 46.

H. P. Lovecraft held extremely racist views throughout his life. Even for the period in which he lived, Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism were egregious. Many of his works of fiction use horror tropes and metaphors to deride “miscegenation,” or marriage between people of different racial groups. In his fiction and in his letters to friends, Lovecraft voiced his enthusiastic support for racist lynch mobs and for Adolf Hitler, despite the fact that his wife was Jewish.