num_pages: 598
description: As the second volume of S. T. Joshi's comprehensive biography of H. P. Lovecraft begins we find Lovecraft dwelling in misery in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights: his wife Sonia has had to move to the Midwest for work and he must rely on the companionship of the Kalem Club the informal band of friends in the New York area. In 1926 in part through the intervention of his close friend Frank Belknap Long Lovecraft finally decided to return to his native Providence Rhode Island effectively ending his marriage. That return spurred the greatest spurt of literary creativity he would ever experience: in less than a year such works as The Call of Cthulhu The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Colour out of Space would emerge from his pen establishing Lovecraft as the leading weird fictionist of his generation. In spite of his increasing poverty antiquarian travel occupied much of Lovecraft's time and he gained an impressive knowledge of such oases of antiquity as Charleston Quebec St. Augustine and Richmond. These voyages both renewed his connection with the past and infused his literary work as such later tales as The Whisperer in Darkness and The Shadow over Innsmouth drew ever more profoundly upon his far-flung travels. Intellectually Lovecraft evolved as well. Recent developments in science confirmed his materialism and his atheism and the onset of the Great Depression gradually caused him to reassess his political and economic theory; he emerged as a moderate socialist and advocate of the New Deal. Late in life he became a giant in the world of fantasy fandom--a development that foreshadowed his worldwide fame in the decades following his early death.
language: English
title: I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 2
publisher: Hippocampus Press