Lovecraft and Providence

H. P. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 20 August 1890, and he died there in March 1937. Apart from a short period in New York in the mid-1920s, he lived in Providence for the whole of his life. The city appears throughout the record he left, and the Archive's Providence localities are the ones it is most confident about.

Where he lived

• 454 Angell Street. The house of his birth, on the East Side. It was demolished in 1961 and an apartment building stands on the site.
• 66 College Street. His last home, from 1933. The house, built in 1825, was moved in 1959 to Prospect Street, where it stands, and the Brown University gallery occupies the original site.

Where he is remembered

• Swan Point Cemetery. He is buried there, and his gravestone carries the words I am Providence.
• The John Hay Library, Brown University. It holds most of his manuscripts, and a plaque there was put up on 20 August 1990, the centenary of his birth.
• Angell and Prospect Streets. The corner is signed H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Square. It is an intersection, not a square.

Providence in the chronicles

Several of the chronicles on file are set in the city, and their localities can be walked. They are the Shunned House on Benefit Street, the laboratory of From Beyond, the church on Federal Hill (The Haunter of the Dark), Curwen's farmhouse at Pawtuxet (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), and the studio and university of The Call of Cthulhu. The Dispatch on Providence on a map gives the positions and the distances between them.

Retracing them

The Providence localities are close enough to be walked in an afternoon. The Shunned House, the Tillinghast site and the Fleur-de-Lys building on Thomas Street lie within a fifth of a mile or so of one another, Brown University is a little over a quarter of a mile from them, and the Federal Hill church site is about a mile to the west. Curwen's farmhouse, at Pawtuxet, is the one that needs a car.