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60 free H. P. Lovecraft trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This H. P. Lovecraft trivia quiz covers the writer, the mythos and the strange afterlife of both. The easier questions are the ones any horror reader knows: where he was born and died, the tentacled god who sleeps beneath the Pacific, the forbidden book he invented and the pulp magazine that printed most of his work. From there it moves into his life story, from the grandfather who told him weird tales and the night-gaunts of his childhood nightmares to his brief marriage, his miserable years in New York and his return to Providence. The harder end is for devoted readers: the story ghostwritten for Houdini, the novella he never typed up, the one book published in his lifetime, the magazine that finally ran At the Mountains of Madness, the origins of Arkham and Miskatonic, the writers of the Lovecraft Circle, August Derleth's reshaping of the mythos, and the tangled question of who owns the copyrights. There are also questions on his influence on Stephen King, heavy metal, tabletop games and Batman's asylum. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the author, his stories and his circle before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King and horror literature quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was H. P. Lovecraft born in 1890 and did he spend most of his life?
Providence
His fan-erected headstone bears the phrase I AM PROVIDENCE, taken from one of his letters.
Q 02What do the initials H. P. stand for?
Howard Phillips
Phillips was his mother's maiden name; his grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips raised him.
Q 03Where was Lovecraft's father committed in 1893 after a psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel?
Butler Hospital
His death certificate cited general paresis, a term for late-stage syphilis; his mother was later committed to the same hospital.
Q 04What did young Lovecraft call the creatures of his childhood nightmares, later used in his fiction?
Night-gaunts
He blamed Gustave Dore's illustrations for their appearance and said they whirled him through space with tridents.
Q 05What periodical did the young Lovecraft publish using a hectograph from 1902?
Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy
He excelled at chemistry and physics but said the mathematics gave him incapacitating headaches.
Q 06Which university did Lovecraft claim he would attend, though he never graduated high school?
Brown
A 1908 breakdown ended his schooling; the exact cause has never been determined.
Q 07A 1913 letter to which magazine, attacking writer Fred Jackson, launched Lovecraft into amateur journalism?
Argosy
The resulting year-long letters-page feud, partly conducted in verse, got him noticed by the amateur press.
Q 08Of which organisation of hobbyist journalists was Lovecraft elected president in 1917?
The United Amateur Press Association
He used its Department of Public Criticism to campaign for archaic English over American slang.
Q 09What was Lovecraft's first published short story, which appeared in 1916?
The Alchemist
Dagon, written soon after, is considered the first story to show the themes he became known for.
Q 10Which Irish fantasy writer's 1919 Boston talk did Lovecraft attend, having recently discovered and idolised him?
Lord Dunsany
His Dream Cycle stories such as The White Ship show that influence.
Q 11Which 1921 story is considered the first that falls definitively within the Cthulhu Mythos?
The Nameless City
It contains the couplet about that which is not dead which can eternal lie.
Q 12Whom did Lovecraft marry in 1924?
Sonia Greene
She was willing to support him financially and thought he needed to leave Providence to flourish.
Q 13What was the informal name of Lovecraft's circle of literary friends in New York?
The Kalem Club
They urged him to submit stories to Weird Tales.
Q 21What was Lovecraft's last original short story?
The Haunter of the Dark
He said the hostile reception of At the Mountains of Madness had done more than anything to end his fiction career.
Q 22What did Lovecraft die of in March 1937?
Cancer of the small intestine
His fear of doctors meant he was not examined until a month before his death, and he kept a diary of his illness.
Q 23What phrase did fans inscribe on the headstone they erected for Lovecraft in 1977?
I Am Providence
It comes from one of his personal letters; he lies in Swan Point Cemetery.
Q 14For which famous escape artist did Lovecraft ghostwrite the story "Under the Pyramids"?
Harry Houdini
Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird accepted it along with many of his other stories.
Q 15Which Weird Tales editor often rejected Lovecraft, then accepted many stories after his death?
Farnsworth Wright
He turned down At the Mountains of Madness because of its length.
Q 16Which Brooklyn neighbourhood, where Lovecraft lived in 1925, gave its name to one of his stories?
Red Hook
His single-room apartment there was burgled, leaving him only the clothes he was wearing.
Q 17What did Lovecraft's weight reportedly rise to on his wife's home cooking?
200 lb
Greene said he performed satisfactorily as a lover but she had to take the initiative in everything.
Q 18Which Texan pulp writer became Lovecraft's correspondent after praising "The Rats in the Walls" to Weird Tales?
Robert E. Howard
Their vigorous correspondence lasted until Howard's suicide in 1936.
Q 19Which completed Lovecraft novel was never typed up, so he ignored a publisher's enquiry?
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Scholars read it as being partly about the city of Providence itself.
Q 20Which was the only Lovecraft story published in book form during his lifetime?
The Shadow over Innsmouth
Only 400 copies were printed, riddled with errors, and about 200 were later destroyed.
Q 24How old was Lovecraft when he died?
46
He had returned to Providence in 1926 and remained active as a writer for 11 years.
Q 25What is Lovecraft's personal philosophy, holding humanity insignificant in the cosmos, called?
Cosmicism
He blended fantasy and science fiction to show the fragility of anthropocentrism.
Q 26Roughly how many letters do biographers estimate Lovecraft wrote in his lifetime?
100,000
About a fifth are believed to survive; he sometimes signed them Grandpa Theobald or E'ch-Pi-El.
Q 27In which year was "The Call of Cthulhu" first published in Weird Tales?
1928
It was written in the summer of 1926, shortly after his return to Providence.
Q 28Which two animals does Cthulhu's green humanoid form visually resemble?
An octopus and a dragon
He is a Great Old One worshipped by cultists and is the namesake of the whole mythos.
Q 29In which sunken city does Cthulhu lie dreaming?
R'lyeh
The story places it beneath the South Pacific.
Q 30Who is the narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu", piecing together his late grand-uncle's notes?
Francis Wayland Thurston
His grand-uncle was Brown University linguistics professor George Gammell Angell.