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.

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 whose name may have originally been 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.^{[citation needed]}

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. The October after meeting him, she issued The Rainbow, a fanzine described by Reinhardt Kleiner as "a large and handsome affair, illustrated with half-tone reproductions of photographs of well-known amateurs of the day and containing excellent contributions by many of them." 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 H. P. Lovecraft and retitled as The Invisible Monster when published in Weird Tales (November 1923). Lovecraft completed his story "Under the Pyramids" in February 1924, but lost his typescript of the story at Union Station in Providence, Rhode Island when he was on his way to New York to marry Greene, who helped him for most of their honeymoon in Philadelphia retyping the manuscript.

Greene also penned the story "Four O'Clock" (suggested by Lovecraft, but not revised by him) which was first printed in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, a collection that also includes "The Invisible Monster" and her memoir "Lovecraft as I Knew Him".