I Am Providence

I started reading S. T. Joshi's biography of H. P. Lovecraft on my kindle yesterday. At first I expected to be thoroughly bored with all the ancestral details that obligatorily preface biographies, followed by all the equally tedious details of the subject's early years, their schooling, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to find, though there were the expected ancestral details, that these were relatively brief (possibly because few details are available) and Lovecraft, being Lovecraft, was a prodigious child who soon did things of direct interest with his later life, particularly his fascination, in turn, with all things Arabic (stirred by reading tales from the Arabian Nights), then his lifelong fascination with ancient Rome. Soon, influenced by dime novels, Edgar Allan Poe, and everything else he could lay his hands on to read, particularly from his beloved seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he was writing short stories which he bound into small hand-made books for sale to his relatives and friends, complete with title pages and copyright details.

So, not far in and already Lovecraft's life is becoming increasingly more interesting.