Today's reading: "The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft."

I'm still in the Schultz/Joshi collection and am finishing Kenneth Faig's essay on Lovecraft's parents. It's interesting and a good read, not something I'd necessarily quote in my own work (at this point, anyway), and I recommend it.

The most interesting thing about it is something that isn't obvious at first. We know much, much more about Lovecraft's mother than we do about his father, which is not how these things normally go. My understanding is that, for example, Victorian women's obituaries would quickly turn to details about their husbands or fathers. The fact that we have so many details about Susie Phillips Lovecraft is both interesting and a boon to our understanding of Lovecraft himself. Winfield Scott Lovecraft, his father, was a traveling salesman and thus left little in the way of a mark on the world.

I doubt either of them would have fully understood the mark their son left with us.