H. P. Lovecraft
Overview
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)--often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...

, fantasy and science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction
Weird fiction
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction written in the late 19th and early 20th century. It can be said to encompass the ghost story and other tales of the macabre. Weird fiction is distinguished from horror and fantasy in that it predates the niche marketing of genre fiction...

.

Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror"
Cosmicism
Cosmicism is the literary philosophy developed and used by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft in his weird fiction. Lovecraft was a writer of philosophically intense horror stories that involve occult phenomena like astral possession and alien miscegenation, and the themes of his fiction over time...

, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind.
Quotations

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

"s:Dagon|Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

"Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6 (October 1919)

 
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