An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The articles appeared variously in the Morning Tribune[MT], Evening Tribune[ET], and Sunday Tribune[ST], as follows: “In the August Sky” (MT, August 1, 1906; ET, August 1, 1906); “The September Heavens” (MT, September 1, 1906; ET, September 1, 1906); “Astronomy in October” (MT, October 1, 1906; ET, October 1, 1906); “The Skies of November” (MT, November 1, 1906; ET, November 1, 1906); “The Heavens for December” (MT, December 1, 1906; ET, December 1, 1906); “The Heavens in January” (MT, January 1, 1907; ET, January 1, 1907); “The Heavens in February” (MT, February 1, 1907); “The Heavens in March” (MT, March 2, 1907; ET, March 2, 1907); “April Skies” (ET, April 1, 1907); “The Heavens in May” (MT, May 1, 1907; ET, May 1, 1907); “The Heavens in June” (MT, 1 June 1907); “Astronomy in August” (MT, August 1, 1907; ET, August 1, 1907); “The Heavens for September” (ST, September 1, 1907); “The Skies of October” (MT, October 1, 1907; ET, October 1, 1907); “The Heavens in November” (MT, November 1, 1907; ET, November 1, 1907); “Heavens for December” (ST, December 1, 1907); “The Heavens in January” (ET, January 1, 1908; MT, January 2, 1908); “February Skies” (ET, February 1, 1908); “The Heavens in the Month of March” (MT, March 2, 1908; ET, March 3, 1908); “Solar Eclipse Feature of June Heavens” (MT, June 1, 1908; ET, June 1, 1908).

The articles are somewhat mechanical accounts of celestial phenomena for the coming month, made interesting by the fact that all except those for August and September 1906, June 1907, and June 1908 feature hand-drawn star charts by HPL, the first (and virtually the last) time that any artwork of his was published in his lifetime. (In the article for March 1908, only the illustration appeared in ET, under the title “The Evening Sky in March.”) The articles end abruptly because a nervous breakdown caused HPL to withdraw from high school.

Pseudonyms, Lovecraft’s.

HPL used pseudonyms frequently, but almost exclusively during his years in amateur journalism and mostly for poems. In part, the pseudonyms were a means of disguising the fact that HPL was contributing more than one item to a given issue of a paper; in other cases (e.g., the religious poem “Wisdom”), HPL may have been wishing to conceal his identity in a work whose subject matter would have been considered anomalous for readers who knew his work. Some pseudonyms (e.g., Henry Paget-Lowe, Ward Phillips) did not well conceal his identity. His first pseudonym was “Isaac Bickerstaffe,” used in late 1914; and this Augustan nom de plumepaved the way for numerous other pseudonyms derivative or suggestive of eighteenth-century poetry. HPL never used pseudonyms for his major works of weird fiction. Below is an alphabetical list of HPL’s pseudonyms and the works under which they appeared in his lifetime (listed chronologically), followed by brief explanations of their use or origin.

“Lawrence Appleton” was used for the poems “Hylas and Myrrha: A Tale” ( Tryout,May 1919) and “Myrrha and Strephon” ( Tryout,July 1919). The name reflects the college where Alfred Galpin studied (Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis.), as these poems deal whimsically with Galpin’s schoolboy romances.

For the use of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s pseudonym “Elizabeth Berkeley” for HPL’s poems “The Unknown” ( Conservative,December 1916) and “The Peace Advocate” ( Tryout,May 1917), see entry for Jackson.

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“Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jr.” was used for HPL’s satirical attacks on the astrologer J.F.Hartmann in the [Providence] Evening News:“Astrology and the Future” (October 13, 1914), “Delavan’s Comet and Astrology” (October 26, 1914), [letter to the editor] (December 21, 1914). For the name see Astrology, Articles on.