Sonia Greene

Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis (March 16, 1883 – December 26, 1972) was an American one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, businesswoman, and milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century. She is noted for her thirteen-year marriage to American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. She was a president of the United Amateur Press Association.

Life and work

Some of Greene's biographical details are unclear – she was born as either Sonia Haft Shafirkin or as Sonia Shaferkin Haft, in either Ichnia, Ukraine, Russian Empire or Konotop, Chernigov Province, to Simyon and Racille (Haft) Shafirkin. She came from a Jewish family. Her father apparently died when she was a child in 1888, and her mother emigrated to the United States, leaving Sonia and her brother in Liverpool at the Baron Maurice de Hirsch School. Sonia joined her mother in the United States in 1892, after her mother remarried to a shopkeeper named Samuel Morris.

At the age of sixteen, on December 24, 1899, Sonia married Samuel Greene, a Russian born Samuel Seckendorff, who was ten years her senior. The following year she gave birth to a son, who died at three months of age. Her daughter, Florence Carol (later Carol Weld) was born on March 19, 1903. According to Lovecraft's correspondent Alfred Galpin, Samuel Greene was "a man of brutal character". The marriage was turbulent, and Samuel Greene died in 1916, apparently by his own hand.

Greene was independently middle class, unusual for women of that time. She worked as a milliner at a department store and traveled frequently for her job. Her salary enabled her to rent a house for herself and her daughter in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which at the time was an affluent suburb. She donated money to several amateur press publications, and traveled to amateur press conventions.

Greene's daughter Florence became a successful journalist under the name of Carol Weld. The two women had a tense relationship, and were eventually estranged. Greene did not mention her daughter in her volume, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, an autobiographical work which details only the period of her relationship and marriage with Lovecraft.

Relationship with H. P. Lovecraft

Greene met Howard P. Lovecraft in 1921 at an amateur press convention in Boston. She had been introduced to the world of amateur journalism four years earlier by Lovecraft's colleague James Ferdinand Morton Jr. Lovecraft reviewed Greene's magazine at some length in The National Amateur (March 1922). A facsimile edition of the magazine was issued by Necronomicon Press in 1977.

Greene's best-known story is "The Horror at Martin's Beach," revised and edited by Lovecraft and retitled as The Invisible Monster when published in Weird Tales (November 1923). Meanwhile, Greene lived on the road, traveling for her job. She sent Lovecraft a weekly allowance that helped him pay for a tiny apartment in the then-working class Brooklyn Heights. Greene slept there one or two days out of the month. During this time, Lovecraft claimed in letters that he was so poor that he lived for three days on one loaf of bread, one can of cold beans, and a hunk of cheese. A few years later, Lovecraft (who had returned to live in Providence, Rhode Island) and his wife, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed.

Later years After her marriage to Lovecraft ended, in 1933, Greene moved to California. In 1936, she married Dr. Nathaniel Abraham Davis from Los Angeles. She was unaware of Lovecraft's passing until 1945, eight years after his death. Her marriage to Lovecraft was not dissolved—he assured her the divorce had been filed, but failed to sign the final decree, so Greene's union with Davis was technically bigamous. Greene was informed of this late in life and it disturbed her considerably. Her third husband died in 1946.

Greene later resided at Diana Lynn Lodge, a home for the elderly which is still in operation in Sunland-Tujunga, Los Angeles, and died there on December 26, 1972, at age 89.

Works

Poems "To Florence" "Mors Omnibus Comunis (Written in a Hospital)". In The Rainbow 1, No 1 (Oct 1921). Facsimile ed, Necronomicon Press, 1977.

Stories "The Horror at Martin's Beach". Revised by H. P. Lovecraft and published (as "The Invisible Monster") in Weird Tales November 1969) "Four O'Clock" Written in 1922 (not published until 1949 in Something About Cats and Other Pieces).

Plays Alcestis (not published until 1985 by R. Alain Everts' The Strange Company, 200 copies only).

Memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (written under the name Sonia H. Davis)

Essays/editorials From The Rainbow: "Amateurdom and the Editor" "Recruiting" "Opinion" "Commercialism" "Amateur Aphorisms" "A Game of Chess" "Heins versus Houtain"

From The Oracle: "Fact vs. Opinion" (an editorial against censoring pornography)

Editor/investor The Organ of the United Amateur Press Association (amateur publication/fanzine) The Rainbow (amateur publication/fanzine)