When he lived in Brooklyn he was very down and out (from wiki). "Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely dislike New York life[3]. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he sublimated in the short story The Horror at Red Hook[4]."
The bit about the brain in the jar reminds me a bit of his story "The Whisperer in Darkness"
Just in case anyone doesn't know, the Lovercraft referred to is HP Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft
When he lived in Brooklyn he was very down and out (from wiki). "Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely dislike New York life[3]. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he sublimated in the short story The Horror at Red Hook[4]."
The bit about the brain in the jar reminds me a bit of his story "The Whisperer in Darkness"