United States of America

The United States of America is the home country of H. P. Lovecraft, most of his correspondents and collaborators, and the setting of the bulk of his weird fiction.
== Lovecraft's America ==
Lovecraft was born into a nation with 44 states--six of those admitted in the previous 12 months--and saw it grow to 48 states, with the admission of Utah (1896), Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico, and Arizona (both 1912). In 1890, the year of his birth, the census recorded nearly 63 million people in the United States; by 1940, three years after his death, the population had more than doubled to 132 million. Over the same time period, average life expectancy advanced from 45 to nearly 63 years. 
There were ten American presidents during Lovecraft's lifetime: Benjamin Harrison (1890-93), Grover Cleveland (1893-97), William McKinley (1897-1901), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09), William Taft (1909-1913), Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), Warren Harding (1921-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-29), Herbert Hoover (1929-33), and Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45). Cleveland, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were Democrats; the other seven were Republicans. 
In Lovecraft's lifetime, the US fought in two major wars, the Spanish-American War (1898) and World War I (1917-1918), then known as the Great War. Other important events in his era include the passage and repeal of Prohibition (1920-1933), and the Great Depression (1929-1939). 
== Travels in the US ==
In the first three decades of his life, Lovecraft's travel was restricted to New England, specifically Rhode Island and its two neighbouring states of Massachusetts and Connecticut. His horizons then broadened considerably, starting with a six-day trip to New York City in April 1922. In August 1922, he visited Alfred Galpin and Samuel Loveman in Cleveland, Ohio. During his two-year residency in Brooklyn, New York, he visited Philadelphia; Washington, DC; New Jersey; and upstate New York. Returning to Providence, Lovecraft visited Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine for the first time in 1927. 
In July 1928, he took a trip south as far as Virginia, documenting his travels in the essay “Observations on Several Parts of America”. He wrote up an April 1930 visit to Charleston, South Carolina, which he found wonderfully preserved, in “An Account of Charleston”. In 1931 he returned to Charleston; visited Savannah, Georgia; and spent considerable time in St. Augustine, Key West, and other Florida towns. A trip that started in May 1932 took him to Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, and allowed him to visit E. Hoffman Price in New Orleans.An H. P. Lovecraft Encylopedia, "Travels, Lovecraft's", S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.
In the summers of 1934 and 1935, Lovecraft had extended stays with R. H. Barlow in DeLand, Florida, visiting or revisiting several cities on the way to and from those visits. 
== America in Lovecraft's Fiction ==
While Lovecraft famously used New England as a backdrop for his horror fiction, leading to the dubbing of a region in northeastern Massachusetts as Lovecraft Country, he also set stories in several other far-flung states, including New York, both the city ("He", "Cool Air", "The Horror at Red Hook") and the state ("The Lurking Fear", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"); Louisiana ("The Call of Cthulhu", "Through the Gate of the Silver Key"); Florida ("The Statement of Randolph Carter"); Kentucky ("The Beast in the Cave"), Oklahoma ("The Mound", "The Curse of Yig"); and Missouri ("Medusa's Coil"). 
== Correspondents ==
Lovecraft maintained a voluminous correspondence with pen pals across the country, including Clark Ashton Smith and Henry Kuttner in California, Robert E. Howard in Texas, August Derleth and Robert Bloch in Wisconsin, Fritz Leiber in Chicago, and Frank Belknap Long in New York City. When these writers contributed their own work to the Cthulhu Mythos, they often used local settings that further broadened the geographic scope of the Mythos. 
== America's Weird Tradition ==
In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft has a chapter on "The Weird Tradition in America", in which he lays out (with a characteristic dollop of racism) what he saw as distinguishing his country's approach to horror: America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon.... This additional fund proceeded...from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man’s relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare. 
== References ==
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Regions/Territories