By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by S.T. Joshi

Dust Jacket Text

This fourth volume of Lovecraft’s collected essays contains his complete travel writings, one of the most distinctive and heartwarming segments of his work. During the last decade of his life, Lovecraft devoted nearly every summer to extensive travels up and down the eastern seaboard, from Quebec to Key West, in search of antiquarian oases. He came to love the town of Charleston, South Carolina, second only to his native city of Providence, Rhode Island. His trip to Vermont in 1927, recorded in his essay “Vermont—A First Impression,” was instrumental in the writing of “The Whisperer in Darkness” three years later. “Observations on Several Parts of America” (1928) and “Travels in the Provinces of America” (1929) reveal, in a flawless replication of eighteenth-century English, his fascination with such locales as Philadelphia, Maryland, and Virginia. “A Description of the Town of Quebeck” (1930–31) is his single longest work, longer than any of his tales; it is printed here for the first time in a corrected text. Also included is the curious pseudo-travelogue “European Glimpses” (1932), ghostwritten for his ex-wife, Sonia, and a previously unpublished travelogue telling of his trip to the Fairbanks house (1636) and the Red Horse Tavern in Massachusetts. All texts are exhaustively annotated, with critical and bibliographical notes, by S.T. Joshi.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) has belatedly achieved universal recognition as the twentieth century’s premier author of supernatural fiction. Poet, essayist, philosopher, and man of letters, Lovecraft’s work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is widely available in numerous annotated editions.

S.T. Joshi is a leading authority on Lovecraft and the author of an exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996). He has prepared many annotated editions of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, essays, and letters, along with such critical studies as H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990) and A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft (1996). He has also done critical and editorial work on Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, and H.L. Mencken.

Contents

• Introduction by S.T. Joshi
  
  
• The Trip of Theobald
• Vermont—A First Impression
• Observations on Several Parts of America
• Travels in the Provinces of America
• An Account of a Trip to the Antient Fairbanks House, in Dedham, and to the Red Horse Tavern in Sudbury, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay
• Account of a Visit to Charleston, S.C.
• An Account of Charleston, in His Maj^ty’s Province of South-Carolina
• A Description of the Town of Quebeck in New-France, Lately added to His Britannick Majesty’s Dominions
• European Glimpses
• Some Dutch Footprints in New England
• Homes and Shrines of Poe
• The Unknown City in the Ocean
• Charleston



• Appendix
• A Descent to Avernus
• Sleepy Hollow To-day


• Index

Bibliographic Information

Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel. By H.P. Lovecraft, Edited by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2005; ISBN 0-9761592-0-1 (hardcover) 0-9761592-1-X (paperback), 300 pages.

Purchasing This Book

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