H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 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 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923, 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.