I've been reading L. Sprague de Camp's biography of H. P. Lovecraft, and I've reached his marriage to Sonia Greene and stay in New York City. During this time, he made enormous, but mostly fruitless, efforts to find more regular employment than his ghost-writing and short stories, but was badly hampered by the fact he was thirty-four years old and had never held a job or finished high school. Still, with a little more luck - or a better-written resume - he might well have been able to find some kind of employment. For example:
L. Sprague de Camp said:
His friends tried to help. Loveman, who arrived in New York on another job hunt in August, thought he could get Lovecraft the editorship of catalogues at the Anderson Galleries, but somebody else got the job.
What if somebody sits Lovecraft down, forces him to write a better cover letter and resume - the surviving example of his letters is just embarrassing - and he gets the position?
I wonder if this might save not just his relationship with Sonia - which fell apart in no small measure due to financial difficulties - but also his attitude towards New York, if he didn't feel himself such a failure. Though the city later came to symbolize everything wrong with society to him, his initial attitudes were much more ambivalent. I doubt he'd ever
like the multi-ethnic nature of the place, but succeeding at
something in the modern world might lift him a little bit out of his depression and misanthropy, even if he remained philosophically futilitarian.