An American writer of tales of supernatural horror (1890-1937).
He is one of the titans of his genre, and indeed of Speculative Fiction as a whole, although he is often overlooked by those with a Science Fiction background; such oversight is a grave and terrible mistake.
HP Lovecraft is perhaps most famous for nightmaring up the Cthulhu Mythos.
Has anyone else noticed the resemblance between 'At The Mountains Of Madness' and John Carpenter's movie 'The Thing'? Obviously, it's only superficialities, but nonetheless, it's cool. It seems John Carpenter made a film called 'In the mouth of madness' which has some vaguely Lovecraftian themes, and has been involved with other HP Lovecraft-related projects, so it's probably not a coincidence.
Random links:
To Do: write lots more about HPL!
Apparently he was inspired by the occultish books hanging around the house during his childhood because his father was a Freemason. More concretely, his Cthulhu Mythos works were an inspiration to the artist HR Giger.
Although HP Lovecraft's writing is universally classed as supernatural horror, it in fact generally has a concretely material basis and a very Hard SF outlook on the world - there's no god or devil, no ghosts, demons or angels; just monsters. Indeed, it is stated or implied that the various horrors are from outer space; the five-winged Old Ones? flew across the cosmic void and settled Ant Arctica?, the Fungi From Yuggoth? are from, well, Yuggoth (which is another name for Pluto) and the star-spawn of Cthulhu are from, er, somewhere else in space. True, he does demur over whether Cthulhu and his mates are ultimately from another dimension or not, but still, it's a pretty materialist worldview. It's all the more chilling for it, in fact.
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