Which writer started out as the astrology columnist for the Providence Evening News?

From 1914 - 1918, the clever writer who started out as an astrology columnist for the Providence Evening News was H. P. Lovecraft. He was a man who was given the name Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He lived from August 1890 – March 1937. He was an American writer of weird fiction and horror fiction. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island and spent most of his life in Providence.

Most of Lovecraft's fiction was primarily set against a New England backdrop. He was never able to support himself from his earnings as an author and news editor. He subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years. He died of cancer at the age of 46 in Providence, RI.

Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his lifetime; he was published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty. Today (2019) he is regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of weird-horror fiction. Among his most celebrated tales are 'The Rats in the Walls', 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'At the Mountains of Madness', 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', and 'The Shadow Out of Time'.

His writings were the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe, originating in his stories which have inspired a large body of pastiches, games, music, and other media material, drawing on Lovecraft's characters, setting and themes, constituting a wider body of work known as Lovecraftian horror.

Lovecraft was not appreciated in the early 1900s, but it is good that his reputation has properly risen.