Lovecraft's fondness for domestic cats is well known. I wondered if someone knew at what times Lovecraft had a cat(s) in his household.

DN

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Lovecraft's fondness for domestic cats is well
> known. I wondered if someone knew at what times
> Lovecraft had a cat(s) in his household.
>
> DN

He had one cat until 1904, when his beloved N-M disappeared.

Lovecraft spent his adulthood in genteel poverty, and never again owned a pet, but he had great fondness for the neighborhood cats, whom he would name and pet and sometimes feed, though they were urban critters. Lovecraft playfully denoted the entire group as Kappa Alpha Tau - like the Greek fraternities - and also wrote about and asked about feline members of the households of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert H. Barlow, etc.

That's rough, if HPL was unable to pay for food to support a cat. I'm imagining that, in his day, it would have been more acceptable than in ours, just to feed the animal -- i.e. I'm supposing that HPL would not have felt he'd better have the cat spayed or neutered, etc. We took home a "barn cat" earlier this year. She needed spaying, and also suffered an eye injury (possibly from one of the other cats in the household -- we don't know), such that the eye needed to be removed: those came to about $1,500 in one week's vet bills. Maybe HPL considered that there were enough cats sharing his neighborhood that he could get along without one of his own.