H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. 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 magazine Weird 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.
 
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has prepared comprehensive editions of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, and poetry. He is also the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also prepared Penguin Classics editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007).