Sonia Greene - Biography

Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis (16 March 1883, Ichnia - 26 December 1972) was a one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, a single mother, business woman and successful milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century. She is perhaps best known for being president of the Amateur Press Association, and her two-year marriage to American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Biography

Greene was born Sonia Haft Shafirkin in the town of Ichnia, Ukraine, Russian Empire. Her father apparently died when she was a child, and her mother emigrated to the United States, leaving Sonia and her brother in Liverpool. Sonia joined her mother in America in 1892.

At the age of sixteen Sonia married Samuel Seckendorff, who was ten years older than her. She gave birth to a son in 1900, who died after three months. Her daughter, Florence Carol, was born on 19 March 1902. Seckendorff, a Russian, adopted the surname Greene, and according to Lovecraft's correspondent Alfred Galpin was "a man of brutal character". The marriage was turbulent, and Greene died in 1916, apparently by his own hand.

Sonia 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 allowed her to rent a nice house for herself and her daughter in the then-fancy area of Brooklyn known as Flatbush. It also allowed her to donate money to several amateur press publications, as well as to travel to amateur press conventions. She met Lovecraft at one such convention, having been introduced to the world of amateur journalism by Lovecraft's colleague James F. Morton in 1917.

After her marriage to Lovecraft ended, in 1933 Greene moved to California. In 1936 she married a Dr Nathaniel Davis of Los Angeles. She did not hear of Lovecraft's death until eight years later, in 1945. Her marriage to Lovecraft was never legally ended because Lovecraft, although he assured her the divorce had been filed, 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.

Greene's best-known story is "The Invisible Monster," which was revised and edited by H.P. Lovecraft for publication in Weird Tales (November, 1923).

Her daughter Florence became a successful journalist under the name of Carol Weld. The two women had a tense relationship, and stopped speaking to each other. Greene does not mention her daughter in her autobiography.

Works

Poems

• "To Florence"
• “Mors Omnibus Comunis (Written in a Hospital)”

Stories

• "The Horror at Martin's Beach". revised by H.P. Lovecraft and published as "The Invisible Monster" (in Weird Tales November, 1923)
• "Four O'Clock" (not published until 1949 in Something About Cats and Other Pieces).

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)

Sources

• The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft, by Sonia Greene (Necronomicon Press, 1985, 1992) (ISBN 0-318047-18-7)
• H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, by S. T. Joshi (Necronomicon Press, 1996) (ISBN 0-940884-88-7)

Notes