H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazineWeird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction-three short novels and about sixty short stories-has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937. S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft'sThe Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(1999), andThe Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories(2001), as well as Algernon Blackwood'sAncient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories(2002). Among his critical and biographical studies areThe Weird Tale(1990),Lord Dunsany- Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination(1995),H. P. Lovecraft- A Life(1996), andThe Modern Weird Tale(2001). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and H. L. Mencken, and is compiling a three-volumeEncyclopedia of Supernatural Literature. He lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.