I, Sunand Tryambak Joshi, was born in Poona (now Pune), India, on June 22, 1958, the third and last child of Tryambak Mahadeo Joshi (1910-1994) and Padmini (Iyengar) Tryambak Joshi (b. 1927). My parents are/were professors of economics and mathematics, respectively. In the summer of 1963 they brought me and my two sisters, Ragini (b. 1952) and Nalini (b. 1955), to live in the United States; we settled in Urbana, Illinois, where my mother taught at the University of Illinois. In 1968 the family moved for a year to Indianapolis, Indiana, and the next year to Muncie, Indiana, where my parents taught at Ball State University.

At the age of thirteen I discovered the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Immediately taken with Lovecraft's evocative prose, I began both to learn more about the Providence writer and to engage in writing myself. I wrote an appalling number of short stories--mystery, horror, fantasy, and science fiction--including two short detective novels, The Ordinary People and the unfinished The Castle of Sebastian. Mercifully, both no longer exist, although some of my short stories (and poems, Gawdelpus) have been embalmed in the literary magazine I edited at my high school, Burris Laboratory School, The Forum (1974-76). One of these, "The Recurring Doom," a Lovecraftian story dating to 1974, was included by Robert M. Price in Acolytes of Cthulhu (Fedogan & Bremer, 2000). I also did a little writing on school goings-on for the local paper, The Muncie Evening Press.

When I was seventeen I decided to abandon fiction-writing and become a literary critic, and in the summer of 1975 I conceived the idea for the book that would become H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (1980). Just prior to my graduation from Burris in 1976, I received an offer from Kent State University Press to compile a new bibliography of Lovecraft. It was largely my interest in Lovecraft that led me to choose Brown University as my undergraduate college, as I knew of Brown's rich holdings in Lovecraft's manuscripts and papers.

As my bibliographic work continued, I began unearthing dozens of works by Lovecraft that had not been known or reprinted, and in this way I compiled my first book, in collaboration with Marc A. Michaud: Lovecraft's Uncollected Prose and Poetry (Necronomicon Press, 1978). At about this time I learned of the acceptance of my critical anthology by Ohio University Press, although it would not appear until 1980; it was the first volume on Lovecraft to appear from an academic press. In 1979 I began editing the scholarly journal Lovecraft Studies for Necronomicon Press. Aside from many editions of Lovecraft's obscurer writings, I have written several scholarly works and compilations for Necronomicon Press, including Lovecraft's Library (1980; rev. ed. Hippocampus Press, 2002), An Index to the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (1980; rev. 1991), Selected Papers on Lovecraft (1989), and An Index to the Fiction and Poetry of H. P. Lovecraft (1992). I also edited Sonia Davis' The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) and Donald Wandrei's Collected Poems (1988).

In 1981 my bibliography of Lovecraft was published. I also received a contract from Starmont House to write a monograph on Lovecraft for the Starmont Reader's Guides series. This was to have been written by Dirk W. Mosig, then the leading Lovecraft scholar and a tremendous influence upon my early work; but Mosig at this time was in the process of abandoning the field, so I was given the assignment. Around this time I attempted to market my translation of Maurice Lévy's Lovecraft ou du fantastique, which I had begun as early as 1976 and which was basically finished by 1978. It was, however, published only in 1988 by Wayne State University Press.

In 1982 I met James Turner, managing editor of Arkham House, and we discussed the prospect of publishing corrected editions of Lovecraft's stories. I had, since the winter of 1976-77, begun the task of collating Lovecraft's texts with surviving manuscripts and early printed appearances, and had found thousands of errors in the standard editions of his fiction, essays, and poetry. After long negotiations with Arkham House, I finally agreed to edit the new editions, and they have now appeared in four volumes: The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984), At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985), Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986), and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989). These corrected texts have served as the basis for new translations into Italian, German, and Japanese.

Meanwhile, I had graduated from Brown University in 1980 (in the department of classics) and had gained a master's degree from Brown in 1982. I was accepted for a Ph.D. program at Princeton University, where I received the Paul Elmer More fellowship in classical philosophy, but left after two years there; I had come to believe that the academic arena was not where I belonged. In 1984 I obtained an editorial position with Chelsea House Publishers, a small educational publisher in New York, and worked there for the next eleven years, until the office shut down. In those years I worked closely with Harold Bloom in editing many volumes of literary criticism under his editorship. I initially lived in Jersey City, New Jersey (1984-90), then moved to Hoboken (1990-93), then, with assistance from my mother, purchased a co-op in Manhattan, where I lived from 1994 to 2001.

In 1986 I decided to form a companion magazine to Lovecraft Studies that would focus on other significant writers of weird fiction. Studies in Weird Fiction took some time in establishing itself, but eventually began appearing twice a year. In the spring of 1991 it was decided to form another magazine devoted exclusively to the reviewing of new works in the field. Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction, coedited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Michael A. Morrison, and myself, was a quarterly journal that appeared regularly until 1999.

In 1987 my interest in weird fiction had expanded to include many writers who had influenced Lovecraft, and I accepted an offer by Darrell Schweitzer to write lengthy articles on Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany for critical anthologies to be published by Starmont House. In this way I came to write The Weird Tale (1990), a theoretical study that I regard as my greatest work aside from my biography of Lovecraft. Shortly thereafter I wrote a monograph on the detective writer John Dickson Carr (published in 1990) as well as the philosophical study, H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Starmont House, 1990). In 1989 I became involved in the preparations for the H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference, held at Brown University on August 18-20, 1990. I edited a volume of conference papers published in 1991 by Necronomicon Press, and contributed to a special issue on Lovecraft of Books at Brown (1995). With David E. Schultz, I edited an anthology of original essays on Lovecraft to commemorate the centennial, An Epicure in the Terrible (1991).

Since 1990 I have worked closely with Schultz in an effort to transfer every word written by Lovecraft into electronic form. Many thousands of pages of stories, essays, poetry, and letters have been transcribed, and Schultz and I have edited several annotated volumes of Lovecraft's letters for Necronomicon Press. I have continued my interests in other weird writers, having compiled (with Darrell Schweitzer) a bibliography of Lord Dunsany (1993) and written a critical study of Dunsany (1995) as well as The Modern Weird Tale (2001), a study of weird fiction from the 1950s to the present. I have written entirely new study of Lovecraft to replace my Reader's Guide; it appeared in 1996 under the title (not of my choosing) A Subtler Magick: The Life and Work of H. P. Lovecraft. I have also taken great interest in the modern British writer Ramsey Campbell. I assisted in assembling a bibliography of his work (1995), and have written the first full-length monograph on him, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (2001).

From 1993 to 1995 I devoted most of my time to the writing of an exhaustive biography of Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life appeared from Necronomicon Press in 1996, where it received wide notice as a standard work; Joyce Carol Oates wrote a long and favorable review of it in the New York Review of Books (October 31, 1996), and it received the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association and the British Fantasy Award. A radically abridged and recast version, entitled A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time, appeared from Liverpool University Press in 2001.

I continue to prepare editions of Lovecraft's works. Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House 1995) is a compilation of Lovecraft's best essays. I have also assembled a volume of Lovecraft's collected poetry, The Ancient Track. This was to have been published by Necronomicon Press, but that firm's collapse in 1999 caused the book to be delayed, and it was finally issued in 2001 by Night Shade Books. My Annotated H. P. Lovecraft appeared from Dell in 1997, and More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft appeared in 1999, although I annotated only one story in that volume ("Herbert West--Re-animator"), the rest of the work having been done by Peter Cannon. By this time I was already preparing annotated editions of Lovecraft for Penguin. Two have appeared--The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999) and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (2001), and a third, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (2004), is forthcoming.

With David E. Schultz, I edited Lord of a Visible World, Lovecraft's "autobiography in letters," for Ohio University Press (2000). Schultz and I are editing numerous annotated editions of Lovecraft's letters for Night Shade and Hippocampus Press. I am also editing a five-volume annotated edition of Lovecraft's Collected Essays for Hippocampus Press.

In a major departure from my usual critical work, I assembled a large anthology, Documents of American Prejudice, a comprehensive collection of American racist writings, with introduction, headnotes, and extensive bibliography. The volume appeared from Basic Books in 1999. Somewhat along the same lines, and perhaps in part derived from my interest in Lovecraft's strong arguments in support of atheism, I have compiled the anthology Atheism: A Reader (2000) and the polemical anti-religious work, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003).

In recent years my attention has turned to other writers, most notably Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and the California literary circle of which they were a part. I am attempting, with Schultz, to transcribe every word of Bierce's voluminous journalism into electronic texts for eventual publication in a critical edition. Schultz and I have assembled the first comprehensive bibliography of Bierce's work (1999), along with such collections of his work as A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography (1998), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (2000), Collected Fables (2000), The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires (2000), and A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters (2003). Schultz, Lawrence I. Berkove, and I are now at work on a comprehensive edition of Bierce's short fiction, to be published by University of Tennessee Press in 3 volumes.

My work on Bierce and George Sterling led to an interest in H. L. Mencken. I assembled a collection of the letters between Sterling and Mencken (2001) as a means of enhancing Sterling's reputation, but now I am pursuing Mencken on his own and appear to have emerged as a leading Mencken scholar. I regularly attend meetings of the Mencken Society, of which I am a member, and I spoke at the meeting in September 2001. I have assembled such collections of Mencken's little-known writings as H. L. Mencken on American Literature (2002), H. L. Mencken on Religion (2002), and Mencken's America (2004).

My work on Mencken has led to an interest in politics, and I have done some preliminary work on a book on the current political scene. But my interest in literature is still strong, and I am working actively (with Schultz) on multi-volume editions of the collected poetry of Clark Ashton Smith and George Sterling. With Stefan Dziemianowicz, I have nearly completed the compilation of a three-volume Encyclopedia of Supernatural Literature for Greenwood Press. I am also thrilled to be editing the work of Lord Dunsany, and my Penguin edition, In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (2004), has just appeared, as has the first of three volumes of The Collected Jorkens (2004). Other editions of Dunsany may follow.

On a personal note, I may mention that I am now married to Leslie G. Boba. She and I met as long ago as 1983, at a summer school at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and were briefly engaged in 1989. She came back in my life in the spring of 2001, and we married in September. She and I now live with our three cats in Seattle, Washington.