Howard Phillip Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 at number 194 (today 454) Angell Street, in Providence, capital of the State of Rhode Island.
An only child in a bourgeois family, Lovecraft had an elitist childhood, where he was taught the importance of class difference, something that would mark him for life. Lovecraft was only about eight years old when his father died, which contributed to his mother becoming overprotective and had the effect of plaguing the young Lovecraft with fears and insecurities. Lovecraft was a child prodigy; he was able to recite poetry by the age of two, read by the age of three, and began writing at the age of six or seven, something he would never give up. However, it was not long before he discovered that making a living from literature was a much more complicated task than he expected. In fact, for most of his life he had to dedicate himself to retouching the writings of other authors. Thanks to this type of work, he met many of those who would later form the famous "Lovecraft Circle", among them Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth and others.
Lovecraft stubbornly refused to surrender to the tastes of the general public, as the publishers demanded. In his own words, "A gentleman does not try to make himself known, he leaves that to the selfish careerists and mean-spirited."
Of a sickly nature, he died in Providence in the early morning hours of March 15, 1937 at only 47 years of age. It had to be many years after his death, when a group of fans erected a tombstone, on which can be read a line taken from one of his thousands of letters:

"I am Providence"