Showing results for "The Call of Cthulhu" in Literary Fiction

HP Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a prodigious but sickly youth. At 14, he contemplated suicide when his grandfather died leaving him and his mother almost penniless. He began to write poetry and a series of literary spats in a newspaper brought him attention and the beginnings of a career. But until the last decade of his life, the works for which we is so well known did not arrive. That last decade was prolific, but with little income, his life downgraded from one rented house to another.

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928. The story's narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died during the winter of 1926 after being "jostled by a nautical-looking negro".