Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, Lovecraft was self-educated and lived in his birthplace all his life, working as a freelance writer, journalist, and ghostwriter. Using many pen names, he contributed his supernatural/horror and science fiction/fantasy stories to various pulp magazines but his reputation as a writer rests mainly on the 60 or so stories he published in Weird Tales starting in 1923. He died in 1937.