H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, and lived most of his life in relative poverty and obscurity, publishing almost entirely in low-paying pulp magazines and dying in 1937 without ever seeing the scale of influence his work would eventually achieve. A largely self-taught polymath with genuine, serious interest in astronomy and the physical sciences, Lovecraft's fiction — beginning in earnest in the early 1920s — developed an increasingly coherent shared universe now known as the Cthulhu Mythos, populated by ancient, vast, fundamentally alien entities indifferent to human existence.

Central to this invented mythology is the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire Lovecraft attributed to a fictional 'mad Arab' author, Abdul Alhazred — a literary device so effectively realised that it has since been mistaken for, and occasionally deliberately reconstructed as, a genuine historical occult text by later writers and hoaxers, despite having no basis whatsoever prior to Lovecraft's invention of it.

Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer in 1937, largely unrecognised, and his posthumous influence was substantially built by a circle of correspondents and fellow pulp writers — August Derleth in particular, who founded Arkham House specifically to keep Lovecraft's work in print — who continued and expanded the Mythos after his death, sometimes in directions Lovecraft's own more austere philosophy did not originally intend.

Lovecraft's own term for his underlying philosophy was cosmicism: the conviction, informed by his genuine interest in contemporary astronomy and physics, that human beings occupy an utterly insignificant position in a vast, ancient, fundamentally uncaring universe — and, crucially, that the entities and forces populating that universe are not evil or malicious toward humanity so much as simply unaware of and indifferent to it, the way a person walking down a street is indifferent to the ants beneath their feet. This is a meaningfully different, and in Lovecraft's own view considerably bleaker, claim than conventional horror's usual premise of active, purposeful malevolent evil.

Lovecraft framed this indifference as the true source of cosmic horror: not that ancient beings like Cthulhu actively hunt or hate humanity, but that human concepts of morality, meaning and significance simply do not register at the scale such entities operate on — a philosophical position closely aligned with a materialist, mechanistic worldview Lovecraft held with genuine intellectual seriousness, not merely as pulp horror set-dressing.