By Ken Faig, Jr.

Back Cover Text

For more than fifty years, Ken Faig, Jr. has been a leading scholar and researcher on the life and work of H. P. Lovecraft. Over the decades he has made landmark discoveries that have clarified many aspects of Lovecraft’s life, ancestry, and the influence of his personal experiences upon his weird fiction. In this new volume of essays, Faig continues his pioneering work in illuminating the obscurer corners of the people and places associated with the writer from Providence, R.I.

A long piece on Lovecraft’s English ancestry—his paternal forbears came from the county of Devonshire, in the southwest corner of England—traces the Lovecraft or Lovecroft name back to the 15th century. An essay on Lovecraft’s uncle by marriage, Edward F. Gamwell, clarifies how this figure influenced his nephew’s early writing. Faig also writes detailed histories of Lovecraft’s first two residences in Providence, 454 and 598 Angell Street.

Amateur journalism was a lifelong hobby of Lovecraft’s, and Faig has done extensive research on the members of the Providence Amateur Press Club and on his occasional nemesis, the literary radical Elsie Alice Gidlow. Faig also directs attention to the interplay between Lovecraft’s life and work as exhibited in such tales as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Dreams in the Witch House.”

Ken Faig, Jr. uses all the research tools at his disposal—from early maps of Providence to census records to tidbits found in Lovecraft’s extant letters—to paint a fuller portrait of Lovecraft and his world, enriching our understanding of the man and his work.

Contents

• Foreword by S. T. Joshi
• Abbreviations
• Lovecraftian People
• Devonshire Ancestry of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
• Edward Francis Gamwell and His Family
• George Elliott Lovecraft: Lost Scion of the House of Lovecraft
• Lovecraft Was Our Neighbor: The People of The Arsdale
• Lovecraftian Places
• The Story of 454 Angell Street: The Birthplace of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
• The People of 598–600 Angell Street
• The Site of Joseph Curwen’s Home in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• Can You Direct Me to Ely Court? Some Notes on 66 College Street
• The Fiction
• John Osborne Austin’s Seven Club Tales: Did They Inspire Lovecraft?
• Ethnic Names in Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”
• Amateur Journalism
• The Providence Amateur Press Club: 1914–16
• The Lovecraft–Gidlow Centenary
• Sources

Bibliographic Information

Lovecraftian People and Places. By Ken Faig, Jr. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2022; ISBN 978-1-61498-337-8 (softcover); 354 pages.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in paperback from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Hippocampus Press.