Born in Providence in 1890 H.P. Lovecraft is nowadays regarded as a major figure on horror literature; Nevertheless, as many different writers before, Lovecraft's work was mostly ignored during his lifetime. His work is inspired by Gothic writers such as Poe, as well as many other fantastic tales like the Arabian nights, the Odyssey and many other important works which he read as a child.
He was considered to be a misanthropic and distant person with a troubled personality, as many of his works seem to suggest. In fact, most of the creatures he imagined are “a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive” as he himself writes in The call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft 1926: 2). Nevertheless, further investigators on his life and work proved that
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As the name suggests, it was Lovecraft who created the basis in which many other authors would write on, and thus extending the whole of a fictional mythological pantheon which nowadays is part of hundreds of works on horror, pulp or science fiction. The weird tales of the Cthulhu
Mythos have become the axis for, not only a never ending amount of tales from renowned authors, but also for video-games, films, role-playing games, or graphic novels. Therefore, It could be claimed that H.P. Lovecraft was advanced for his time, as he represented in his tales the themes of interest and anxiety of present day society, more than seventy years after his death.
The style in which Lovecraft writes is no longer considered Gothic, but cosmic horror.
The main reasons are mainly that the terror depicted in Lovecraft's tales is not focused on ghosts or that sort of creatures, but rather it is related to alien entities from beyond human understanding. The monsters in the Cthulhu Mythos come from beyond time and space and are always used to represent the feebleness and meaninglessness of mankind.