ABSTRACT
The biography of author H.P. Lovecraft remains a significant presence in the study of his work, far more so than for many authors, and markedly more so than for most of his pulp contemporaries. This tendency persists for multiple reasons, not least readers’ drive to learn more about the author because of his work’s ongoing popularity across many media and via many adaptations. Lovecraft worked broadly and in depth to develop an authorial persona, bolstered by reams of correspondence, socializing, and other writings. Much of Lovecraft’s paraliterary output is still in print, and there is the possibility of far more yet to come, which will necessarily extend the ongoing struggles over the nature of his legacy. The foundations of this struggle were laid by Lovecraft himself, extending far beyond the content of his fiction and poetry, as he pursued strategies as canny as that of any other Modernist. During Lovecraft’s life and afterward, through the perpetuation of the idea of the Lovecraft Circle and the posthumous creation of a publishing house devoted to disseminating his work, including the early, important, and not uncomplicated publication of his Selected Letters, the man and the work have been inextricably intertwined.
