A Last Defense Against The Dark

Timothy H.
Evans
A Last Defense against the Dark:

Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of
Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft
In a cosmos without absolute values . . . there is only one anchor of fixity . . . ,

and that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed
to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national,
biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means
everything locally and pragmatically because we have nothing else to
shield us from a devastating sense of “lostness” in endless time and space.
— H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1965–76, 2:356–57
THE R EL ATIONSHIP OF folklore to literature is complex. While writers

may incorporate oral, customary, or material traditions to provide
color, texture, or structure in their literary works, folklore also imbues
those texts with authenticity. Folklore implicitly claims a transcendent
“realness” for an author’s ideology, whether that ideology is national-
ist (as in the case of Finland’s Elias Lönnrot), separatist (as in the
works of Zora Neale Hurston), pluralist (Barbara Kingsolver), feminist
(Sandra Cisneros), anti-modernist (J. R. R. Tolkien), or socialist (Wil-
liam Morris). In these examples, folklore-bearing cultures are often
situated in opposition to threatening and “inauthentic” others, such
as an imperialist regime, mass culture, or immigrants who disregard
an existing cultural order.
Horror literature sheds light on how folklore can be used to these
ideological ends. Drawing on legends and beliefs, on the architecture
of old houses and the iconic power of religious symbols, horror writers
often evoke “tradition” and “the past” in order to explore a perceived
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
99
100 Timothy H. Evans
loss of tradition in the present. Much horror literature is predicated

upon feelings of insecurity brought about by cultural change, by
the idea that our families and communities, our familiar beliefs and
cultural forms, are increasingly under assault by forces beyond our
control. Whether the proposed threat is secularism, modernism, or
multiculturalism, tradition is often central to horror narratives.1
The work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), the influ-
ential American horror and science fiction writer, is a case in point.
Lovecraft’s writings embodied much of the ideology that surrounded
the interest in folklore and tradition in the United States during the
1920s and ’30s. Motivated by an antimodernist rejection of industrial
capitalism and everything that surrounded it—including commer-
cialism, mass culture, and immigration—Lovecraft combined an
antiquarian interest in folklore and historic material culture with
the passions of a preservationist and worries about cultural loss and
miscegenation. To this agenda he brought the literary traditions of
supernatural fiction, travel narrative, and regional local color writing
to create a unique body of work that drew its authoritative voice from
the use (and invention) of folklore.
But anti-modern as Lovecraft’s ideas might have been in the begin-
ning, they evolved dynamically over time, incorporating contradictions
that encapsulate the anxieties of many twentieth-century artists and
intellectuals. In the course of his life and writings, the defender of
Anglo-colonial traditions became an exemplar of hybrid forms and
subcultures, a movement that parallels changes in the concept of
“tradition” among folklorists. Lovecraft’s writing shifts from a preoc-
cupation with the transmission of “pure” traditions from the past to a
concern with the dynamic creation of hybrid art forms in subcultures.
His voice can be seen as a significant and unique contribution to the
continuing American discourse on the role of tradition and imagina-
tion in a world of markets, technology, and entropy, a discourse that
continues in contemporary subcultures.
Tradition and Lovecraft’s Writing

Lovecraft liked to boast of his descent from “unmixed English gentry”
and was a devoted student and defender of his New England heritage.
Throughout his adult life he sought out survivals of colonial European
cultures, searching for “the simpler, tradition-anchored world into
Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft 101
which [he] was born” (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:228). He embarked on

long antiquarian tours, most often of New England, although in his
later life he ranged from Quebec to Florida to New Orleans. On these
tours he observed, documented, or collected a wide variety of early
American oral, material, and customary folklore. Lovecraft’s research
influenced setting and atmosphere in his fiction, but this was not his
chief motive for undertaking it. Rather, both his research and his fic-
tion grew out of his horror at the disintegration of American culture
in the face of moral, racial, and scientific chaos. Influenced by the
Colonial Revival movement and, more generally, by a yearning for
an authentic American culture to be found in perceived continuities
with a colonial or pre-industrial Anglo-Saxon golden age, Lovecraft
worked passionately to support historic preservation in his native
Providence, Rhode Island.
Lovecraft also engaged the notion of tradition through discourse:
his take on tradition2 emerged in two primary forms, antiquarian travel
writing and horror stories. The first expressed a kind of existential
attempt to preserve meaning in a meaningless universe by document-
ing and protecting the physical evidence of tradition in the built
environment. His fiction, on the other hand, juxtaposed the symbols
and artifacts of traditional culture with twentieth-century images of a
vast cosmos and relative values, deriving horror both from tradition
lost and from fears that tradition is meaningless in the first place. His
interest in vernacular culture stemmed from a desire to preserve a kind
of vernacular aesthetic rather than history per se. “The joy we take in
even the ugliest and most grotesque of traditional objects,” he wrote,
“is not a false one. It is . . . truly aesthetic in an indirect way; through
the . . . historic and cultural symbolism of the objects. Such objects even
when intrinsically unbeautiful, form an invaluable sort of springboard
for the imagination” (1965–76, 2:303). Ultimately, his work posits the
creation of new traditions (and therefore new meanings) out of past
traditions reinvented by the artist.
Many scholars have focused on Lovecraft’s horror narratives, cast-
ing the author as an idiosyncratic creator of fantasy tales. To the extent
that critics consider influences on Lovecraft’s writing, they often point
to other “fantasy” writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen,
or Lord Dunsany (Burleson 1983; Joshi 1999). But Lovecraft’s closest
intellectual peers in the 1920s and ’30s were arguably folklorists and
antiquarians. Those who sought out authentic American traditions
varied from New England patricians such as Samuel Adams Drake to

nationalistic collectors like Charles Skinner and regional folklorists
such as Henry Shoemaker; from folklorists associated with the Fed-
eral Writers’ Project, such as John Lomax and Benjamin Botkin, to
artistic and literary figures such as Thomas Hart Benton or Stephen
Vincent Benet (Bealle 1994; Bronner 1998; Hirsch 2003; Kammen
1991). Lovecraft shared with all of these men the idea that tradition
was a moral system in conflict with its time, a bastion of beauty and
community, an endangered resource that needed documentation and
protection in the face of rapid change. These figures also agreed that
American traditions were and must continue to be grounded in place
or region, and many of them, including Drake and Shoemaker, shared
Lovecraft’s equating of regional cultures with older, colonial cultures
(Bronner 1998:323, 327). Finally, these men agreed that vernacular
culture needed to be preserved not only for its own sake but also in
order to engender a distinctly American art. That is, they valued folk
traditions not as static genres but as the wellspring for new, dynamic
cultural forms.
Compared to his fiction, Lovecraft’s voluminous antiquarian writ-
ings are hardly known—yet his fiction cannot be understood fully
without a consideration of them. The antiquarian writings provide a
fascinating case study in the politics of antiquarianism, historic pres-
ervation, and the pursuit of “authentic” American traditions in the
early decades of the twentieth century. Detailed, informative, poetic,
insightful, opinionated, and humorous, these writings are also racist,
angry, elitist, and anti-democratic. They express and comment on the
most cogent issues, opinions, and ideologies involved in the study of
tradition during Lovecraft’s lifetime.
Antiquarian Travels
As an only child raised by a single mother who was neurotically over-
protective, Lovecraft compensated for a lack of close human connec-
tions through a very strong sense of place. In a letter dated 1926, he
wrote, “My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local
affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural”
(Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 29 March 1926, Lovecraft Papers). From an
early age, Lovecraft developed a profound attachment to and intimate
knowledge of his native Providence. Always a night owl, beginning in
his teens he would take long nocturnal rambles around historic parts
of the city. Later in life, his architectural tours3 of Providence were
much sought after by his acquaintances.
Although he lived all but two years of his life in Providence, as
Lovecraft got older his attachment to place extended to the traditional
landscape and architecture of New England, and eventually to pre-
industrial landscapes in other parts of the country. Living in poverty
most of his life, Lovecraft traveled by bus, stayed at the cheapest ac-
commodations he could find, and ate very little. His trips sometimes
lasted for months and resulted in detailed observations of town plans,
rural and urban cultural landscapes, cemeteries, and furniture and
other interior details, as well as notes on legends, supernatural be-
liefs, regional dialects, and street cries he heard along the way and
sometimes incorporated into his stories. Despite never owning a car,
Lovecraft managed to visit many rural areas; he had a reputation for
bashfulness, yet he knocked at the doors of interesting houses and
asked to see their interiors. Each of his studies was a work in progress:
he returned over and over to nearby favorite places (including many
parts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts) and made multiple trips to
more distant locations including Quebec; Charleston, South Carolina;
St. Augustine, Florida; and Dutch settlements in New York (Lovecraft
1995:407–11).
During his trips, Lovecraft would typically spend all day traveling,
observing and taking notes that became the basis of long letters writ-
ten throughout most of the night. These letters included painstaking
historical and architectural details and many illustrations; he wrote
hundreds of them, many thirty or forty pages long, throughout the
1920s and 1930s.4 Despite Lovecraft’s comment that he was not in-
terested in people, people do emerge in these writings, if not always
at the forefront. At times they seem like quaint adjuncts to the archi-
tecture, comic character sketches, or both: his lengthy description of
two decrepit old ladies who gave him a tour of the Fowler House in
Salem, Massachusetts, is one example (1965–76, 1:219–21). His anti-
quarian writings, however, abound with beliefs and legends learned
from people he met. Lovecraft tended to be somewhat casual about
collecting oral folklore: a detailed description of a visit to an archi-
tectural site will often end with an aside. Describing a site in Florida,
Lovecraft remarks offhandedly, “ . . . and picked up quite a bit of local
lore from the old man there” (Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 25 June
1934, Lovecraft Papers). Lovecraft was also interested in dialect; he

commented frequently on regional pronunciations (see his lengthy
correspondence with J. Vernon Shea, Lovecraft Papers). It all became
fodder for his stories.
From 1928 to 1931, Lovecraft drew on his correspondence, notes,
and local travel guides to produce his annual travelogues. Not in-
tended for publication and not published until the latter decades of
the 1900s, these reports were full of inside jokes, handwritten in a
mock eighteenth-century (but generally very readable) style, and cir-
culated among his considerable number of correspondents. The first
two travelogues (large parts of which were taken almost word-for-word
from letters he wrote to his aunt Lillian), cover travel from Vermont to
Virginia during the calendar year. They tend to spotlight the standard
1920s tourist sites and are most notable for their focus on regional
vernacular traditions, such as the architecture of Dutch New York,
and for Lovecraft’s enthusiasm not only for historic neighborhoods
but also for recreated villages such as Colonial Williamsburg, “one of
the most impressive evocations of the Colonial past that America can
display” (Lovecraft 1995:297–360, at 335).
The last two travelogues are entirely different. These are detailed
studies of specific places: Charleston and Quebec City (Lovecraft
1995:361–406, 1976:111–309). His work on Quebec, at 75,000 words,
is his longest single piece of writing. Each work is divided into three
sections: history, architecture and topography (by which he meant what
contemporary scholars would call cultural landscapes), and suggested
walking tours. The history sections are based entirely on secondary
sources; Lovecraft was well acquainted with the published literature on
the areas he visited. In the earlier travelogues, the influence of locally
acquired guides is evident, but in Charleston, Quebec, and thereafter,
most of Lovecraft’s observations are based on fieldwork. Lovecraft
would start with published walking tours in such places, but he would
seek out “authentic” neighborhoods, landscapes, and architecture not
covered in the tours.
Although the travelogues are impressive, they are dwarfed by the
letters. Written to a great many people, the letters include large quan-
tities of additional material on travelogue sites such as Charleston,
as well as detailed descriptions, commentary, and insights on other
places. In June 1926, for example, Lovecraft wrote a travel guide to
Philadelphia at the request of a friend. Based almost entirely on his
memories of a visit made in November 1924 (he had lost his notes),
the letter includes detailed architectural drawings and a discussion
of Swedish, German, and New England influences on Philadelphia
architecture. Later letters include lengthy historical and architectural
guides to St. Augustine, Key West, rural parts of Florida, Savannah, New
Orleans, and Nantucket. In 1935 and 1936, Lovecraft concentrated
on New England. His chief focus was historic architecture in Rhode
Island, but his final illness and death prevented him from producing
a unified work on this topic.5
Travel Writing and Heritage Tourism

Car tourism increased considerably during Lovecraft’s lifetime, and his-
toric sites, markers, and museums proliferated alongside this phenom-
enon. No longer the sole province of the wealthy, tourism flourished
as buses, self-guided walking tours, and inexpensive motels and hostels
made recreational travel possible even for people with meager incomes
and without automobiles. Travel guides and essays both reflected and
encouraged this kind of tourism. Self-consciously “literary” travel writ-
ing, such as that of Mark Twain and Henry James, had increased in
popularity after the Civil War; by the early twentieth century, the genre
was pervasive (Kammen 1991:539; Lindgren 1995:120).
This travel literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries participated in the act of nation-building. Between 1880 and
1940 a “prescriptive” tourist literature emerged, which provided tour-
ists with a kind of official list of sites to visit, whether they be architec-
tural masterpieces in Charleston or geysers in Yellowstone. Marguerite
Shaffer suggests that such literature aimed to celebrate national unity
by creating a nationwide canon of tourist sites that defined America
and Americans. Thus, tourism became a way for Americans to discover
or reinforce their national identity.
At the same time, the more personalized and literary genre of “tour-
ing narrative” developed. In the process of setting down their own,
idiosyncratic travel narratives, writers transformed the prescriptive tour
guides according to their “personal understanding of what America
represented and where tourists as individuals fit in with that America”
(Shaffer 2001:241). In so doing, Shaffer argues, “tourists embraced
the values of official culture . . . [and] simultaneously challenged the
official ideal of national unity with their own concerns, ideals and
anxieties” (241). Dean MacCannell describes a similar phenomenon

in The Tourist: travel guides direct the visitor to particular areas or
neighborhoods but also “exten[d] to matters of detail, setting the
tourist up with a matrix which he can fill in” (1976:50).
Lovecraft was both a consumer and a producer of such heritage
tourism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not collect objects
on his travels, but instead gathered observations and memories which
filled his letters. He traveled to the standard tourist destinations, bought
the guide books, took the walking tours, and collected postcards, but
in his own writings he made the guidebooks into something at once
more idiosyncratic, more detailed and scholarly, and more passionate.
Always beginning with the official, prescriptive guides and walking
tours, Lovecraft transformed them into his own extended studies. His
travelogues represent a search for an “in depth” tourist experience:
“a desire to go beyond the other ‘mere’ tourists to a more profound
appreciation of society and culture” (MacCannell 1976:10). Lovecraft
incorporates complex detail, as well as descriptions of people and cats
met along the way and digressions on history, aesthetics, philosophy,
and other topics. The gothic style of his travel writing leaves the reader
with a sense of mystery, wondering what mystical merging with the past
the author experienced but did not describe.
In this, Lovecraft calls to mind such figures as Lafcadio Hearn,
whose writings about the American South in the 1870s and ’80s
similarly combine the ethnographic and the gothic (Hearn 2002), or
Sarah Orne Jewett’s protagonist in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896),
who is a tourist seeking an authentic New England embodied in rural
folk culture.6 Charles Skinner also saw travel and walking tours as an
appropriate narrative form for the folklorist (Bealle 1994:107–08).
Lovecraft pursued this kind of work not only to gather material for
his fiction, but also because of a scholarly passion for material culture.
This enthusiasm, in turn, grew out of a Colonial Revival ideology, a
search for an “authentic” colonial landscape that would transport him
into an uncorrupted past.
Architecture
From the start of his travels, Lovecraft’s interest in architecture was
primarily aesthetic rather than historical, focusing on culture and
landscape rather than on famous historical events or personalities.
Many of his contemporaries in the emerging historic preservation

movement, such as Norman Isham and William Sumner Appleton,
had a similar focus (Lindgren 1995:104). In his later writings, in-
cluding his studies of Quebec and many of his letters, Lovecraft was
interested in the description and comparison of regional traditional
forms. He classified houses and other buildings by floor plan; roof
line; placement of doors, windows, or chimneys; and overall massing.
For each form he supplied a wealth of examples and close descriptions
of materials, windows and doors, exterior decorations, and what he
could determine about construction techniques. His later antiquarian
writings were almost always comparative, based in observations and
readings about various North American regions. Although he was
most interested in houses, he documented churches, barns, fences,
stone walls, cemeteries, layouts of streets or fields, gardens, and
many other topics in much the same way. At times he could go on at
great length comparing specific details such as the shapes of roofs
or gravestone carvings. And although he was interested primarily in
older structures, Lovecraft was observant enough to remark, in his
Quebec travelogue, that traditional forms were still being used in
modern structures built with modern materials. Further, Lovecraft
considered (but never carried out) several large-scale multiregional
studies, including a comparative study and history of gambrel roofs
throughout the eastern United States (Lovecraft 1965–76, 3:358).
H. P. Lovecraft was drawn to local and regional traditions, which
he saw as organic growths. “Habitations of men,” he wrote, “should
never be made—they should be sown, water’d, weeded, tended, and
allowed to grow.” Elsewhere he remarks that what makes a town lovely
and fascinating is “the continuous history of its inhabitants—the marks
of original settlement, slow expansion, and developments in channels
and directions determin’d by the topography of the sites and aspira-
tions and genius of the people” (1965–76, 1:287–88). In a letter from
1930, he identifies twelve “really indigenous” traditions of regional folk
architecture.7 Like contemporaries such as Norman Isham, Lovecraft
looked down on most twentieth-century and Victorian architecture;
he preferred structures older than approximately the mid-nineteenth
century, feeling that modern architecture had abandoned meaning
in favor of pure functionalism. Though an advocate of period revival
architectural styles, he felt that such styles needed to be vernacular re-
vivals, following local and regional traditions (Lovecraft 1995:190–98).
After viewing a recently constructed Spanish Colonial suburb near St.

Augustine in 1931, Lovecraft concluded that the houses belonged to
“an imaginary Spain which never was” and never would be: “Archi-
tects could study the real types of building evolved by the Spaniards
in different parts of their colonial Empire, and produce duplicates
harmonizing . . . with the genuine local traditions” (Lovecraft to Lillian
Clark, 11 May 1931, Lovecraft Papers).
One of the most consistent themes running through Lovecraft’s
antiquarian writings is his enthusiasm for historic material culture.
His discovery of a new historic site, or his return to an old one, could
at times transport him to another time or another cultural world. “I
cannot tell it, but have to sing it!” Lovecraft wrote of his first visit to
Marblehead, Massachusetts: “I had sojourned for a time in the past itself
—not the past of books, but the living, breathing streets. Since then I
have dreamt of nothing but Marblehead” (1965–76, 1:234–36). All his
adult life, he searched for “really old and naturally developed” towns
and cultures that could evoke this transcendence of time because of
their perceived authenticity (Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 12 June 1931,
Lovecraft Papers).
The Colonial Revival Movement

Lovecraft’s antiquarianism and his interest in the vernacular were
the result of his upbringing, family background, and personality,
but they were also strongly influenced by popular movements of the
day. The Colonial Revival movement and the New England historic
preservation movement, for instance, were exemplified by the Society
for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and, most
notably, by the Providence architect, architectural historian, and
preservationist Norman Isham. Although an admirer of the SPNEA,
Lovecraft never actually joined it. Likewise, he was an avid follower
of Isham (whom he referred to as “the supreme architectural author-
ity of all”) and heard him speak several times, but never introduced
himself (Lovecraft 1995:513).
Like Isham and SPNEA founder William Sumner Appleton, Love-
craft romanticized preindustrial folklife. His ideal was a vision of eigh-
teenth-century New England as a land of small rural villages, traditional
crafts, and farmers of “pure Yankee stock.” In 1927 he wrote:
Familiar forces and symbols—the hills, the woods, and the seasons—be-
come less and less intertwined with our daily lives as brick and stone
horizons and snow-shoveled streets and artificial heating replace them,
and the quaintly loveable little ways of small places die of inanition as
easy transportation fuses all the surface of a great country into one
standardized mold. Craftsmanship and local production are dead—no
one man completely makes anything, and no one region subsists to any
great extent on its own products either material or intellectual. Quantity
and distribution are the watchwords in an age where factories . . . reign
supreme; and all sectional manners and modes of thought are obliter-
ated. (1965–76, 2:131)
If the anti-modernist ideology expressed here shows hints of
John Ruskin with its critique of capitalism, mass production, and
urbanization, another common theme was a disdain for immigrants.
Lovecraft’s early story “The Street” (1920) traces the history of a
street in an unnamed New England town founded in colonial times
by British settlers. As the buildings gradually decay or are hidden
under modern additions, “swarthy and sinister” immigrants move in
and the area turns into a slum (Lovecraft 1986:343–49). Eventually an
anarchist plot is hatched on the street and the buildings self-destruct
in a thunderous climax, taking their inhabitants with them. The link
made here between urban decay and immigration, and by implication
between historic preservation and anti-immigrant sentiment, runs
through Lovecraft’s writings. In numerous essays, letters, and stories
such as “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), Lovecraft decried what
as he saw as the decline of American (and especially New England)
civilization caused by the invasion of immigrants, who were creating
a “mongrel” American (Lovecraft 1986:244–65). His travel writings
commonly linked the survival of a region’s historic character with the
percentage of the population that was “pure American.” Although
Lovecraft celebrated the diversity of regional cultures, he saw recently
arrived immigrants and independent African Americans as a threat
and retained a lifelong concern about miscegenation (Lovecraft
1995:325).
Lovecraft’s opinions were hardly unusual; they echoed those of
a good many New England intellectuals, politicians, and preserva-
tionists of the time, from Henry Cabot Lodge to Henry James and
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Higham 1965:141–42; Lindgren 1995:31,
37; Solomon 1956:88). Nativism was commonly linked to historic
preservation. The antiquarian, folklorist, and preservationist Samuel

Adams Drake—a prominent SPNEA member whose writings were well
known to Lovecraft—despised immigrants and saw them as a threat
to his work; likewise, William Sumner Appleton felt that protecting
buildings and places could help preserve Anglo-Saxon culture in New
England (Lindgren 1995:37, 70). Folklorists John Lomax and Henry
Shoemaker represented American folklore as a hierarchy, placing
colonial traditions at the top (Bronner 1998:323; Hirsch 2003:25).8
Further, several commentators have linked Lovecraft to early-twentieth-
century American advocates of eugenics and scientific racism, such as
Madison Grant and Kimball Young (Lovett-Graff 1997).
Lovecraft certainly was conversant in contemporary theories of
race, but New England Brahmin politics and the emerging historic
preservation movement were at least as influential in the shaping of
his ideas. A letter from 1923 reveals an elitist aspect to his antiquar-
ian vision:
Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. . . . ‘Equality’ is a
joke—but a great abbey or cathedral . . . is a poignant reality. It is for us
to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys,
and palaces, and picturesque walled towns, and vivid sky-lines of steeples
and domes. . . . [T]hese are all there is of life; take them away and we have
nothing which a man of taste and spirit would care to live for. (1965–76,
1:207–09)
However, Lovecraft’s politics changed in the 1930s from conserva-

tive to socialist, and toward the end of this life he also moderated
his racism somewhat. Partly this was due to his ever increasing circle
of friends and correspondents, which included people from many
cultural backgrounds. His exposure to French, Spanish, and other
cultural traditions during his antiquarian travels was also a factor:
his work on Quebec, for example, includes eloquent statements of the
value of French Canadian and Native American cultural traditions
(Lovecraft 1976:133–34, 138–39). He was even willing to concede
the value of immigrant cultures in Providence; in a 1930 letter, he
praises Providence’s “splendidly impressive” Italian Catholic churches,
although he also set a horror story, “The Haunter of the Dark,” in one
of them (Lovecraft to August Derleth, 1930, Derleth Papers). Through
these shifts in perspective he continued to see historic preservation as
a way to protect the landscapes that gave meaning to his life.
Historic Preservation
Lovecraft’s correspondence frequently laments the destruction of his-
toric architecture; for example, in 1927 he was “mortified” to discover
that the seventeenth-century neighborhood of Boston’s North End,
in which he set the story “Pickman’s Model” (1926), had been largely
demolished. His own activism, however, was reserved for his native
city (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:170). After two unhappy years in New York
City, in 1926 Lovecraft returned to his hometown and found his pas-
sion for it renewed. “I am Providence, and Providence is myself,” he
wrote, “together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro’ the ages” (2:51).
He believed Providence to be threatened by the same forces—namely,
urban decay, development, immigration, and commercialism—that
made New York a “dead city without connexion [sic] with American
life” (2:45).
Frequent letters to local newspapers reveal Lovecraft as an articulate
protector of Providence’s historic buildings and neighborhoods. He
expressed outrage over threats to the city’s historic structures, includ-
ing the 1935 destruction of several colonial-era buildings on College
Street to make way for an expanded Rhode Island School of Design. In
a 1926 letter to the Providence Sunday Journal, he advocated a city-funded
rehabilitation program for historic structures (especially the rows of
Colonial and Federal houses that comprised a slum on North Benefit
Street), as well as zoning laws that would protect historic neighbor-
hoods and keep new construction compatible with the city’s historic
fabric (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:73). These were cutting edge views.
His activities as a preservationist climaxed in an unsuccessful cam-
paign to save a row of 1816 brick warehouses and commercial buildings
fronting the Providence River at the base of College Hill. “Brick Row,” a
prominent landmark, was a particular favorite of Lovecraft: it reminded
him of Providence’s former importance as a center of maritime com-
merce. He refers to Brick Row in several stories, most notably in his
1927 novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Lovecraft 1985:114–15). In
1927, with the construction of a new county courthouse across from
Brick Row on South Main, the city and county jointly proposed razing
the warehouses to construct a Hall of Records. Lovecraft reacted to
this with an intensive letter-writing campaign. For instance, in a letter
(really an essay) published in the Providence Sunday Journal on 24 March
1929, he proposed converting the warehouses into a Hall of Records by
gutting their interiors and installing modern, fireproof materials. He

also urged everyone he knew to write letters—to the point of sending
acquaintances letters he wrote himself, which they were to sign and
mail to the Providence Journal.9 However, his campaign was virtually the
only opposition to the razing. Ironically, the buildings were destroyed
just as the Depression started, and the city and county decided to use
the site as a parking lot because they could not afford a new Hall of
Records (Lovecraft 1995:511–15).
In an era when historic preservation generally focused on na-
tional landmarks, high-style architectural treasures, or the houses of
prominent people, Lovecraft’s advocacy for a warehouse district was
unusual.10 Such a perspective grew out of his lifelong emphasis on
landscapes rather than isolated buildings, which in turn led him to
emphasize the historic character of neighborhoods and communities,
including streets, gardens, hedges, fences, and so on. It was in the
preservation of landscape that the local traditions so loved by Love-
craft, and so crucial in retaining the character and distinctiveness of
Providence or any other town, would be preserved.
Ideology, Travel Writing, and Lovecraft’s Fiction

The Colonial Revival movement, historic preservation, and the emer-
gence of heritage tourism and travel literature were closely linked in
Lovecraft’s life and thought, and indeed in America generally at this
time. The most obvious models for Lovecraft’s travel writings were
patrician New England authors associated with the Colonial Revival.
For example, Samuel Adams Drake’s travel books, such as Nooks and
Corners of the New England Coast (1875) and Old Landmarks and Historic
Personages of Boston (1873), parallel Lovecraft’s work in structure, con-
tent, and ideology. Drake typically organized his books as walking
tours and included lengthy digressions about history, architecture,
crafts and occupations, local dialects, legends and beliefs, street
cries, and literature—the very topics Lovecraft favored. Although
Drake’s writing style is more sentimental than Lovecraft’s, it is full of
similar political, cultural, and aesthetic observations: love of colonial
architecture and landscapes and their association with vanishing
Anglo-Saxon virtues, a passion for historic preservation, a disdain
for Victorian architecture, an interest in folklore, and a fear of and
contempt for immigrants.11
Drake is perhaps the greatest exemplar of Colonial Revival travel

writing, which pervades many of the popular books that focused
on New England or colonial sites during this era, including Wilfred
Munro’s Picturesque Rhode Island (1881), Robert Shackleton’s The Book
of Boston (1916), and Annie H. Thwing’s The Crooked and Narrow Streets
of Boston (1920). By the 1920s, books like Clara Walker Whiteside’s
Touring New England on the Trail of the Yankee (1926) were oriented to
automobile tourism rather than to pedestrians, but they still yearned
for an authentic, colonial America. Many passages from Whiteside’s
book almost could have been written by Lovecraft: they celebrate small
town and rural “colonial” landscapes, search for “true Americans”
from the “old stock,” and reflect contempt for foreigners who have
moved into old houses. Whiteside even shared Lovecraft’s horror
at hearing foreign languages spoken in “colonial” settings (Shaffer
2001:235–36).
Lovecraft’s passion for finding entire landscapes that would envelop
him in the past was common to the Colonial Revival movement. For
instance, during Lovecraft’s lifetime, groups attempted to recreate
colonial villages for tourists in such places as Litchfield, Connecticut;
Old York, Maine; Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; and to some extent
in Salem, Massachusetts. The latter became the model for Lovecraft’s
fictional village of Arkham (Butler 1985; Conforti 2001:234–62). Other
villages that Lovecraft invented as narrative settings, such as Dunwich,
Kingsport, and Innsmouth, also parallel the goals of Colonial Revival
villages: they immerse the individual in imagined colonial landscapes.
The difference is that in Lovecraft’s landscape, the immersion is
terrifying. Travelers don’t find their way back. In seeking authentic
experience, that unobtainable goal of tourists, these figures are either
destroyed or utterly transformed. Lovecraft created an intensity of
experience beyond anything for sale at Colonial Williamsburg.
Antiquarian Explorers in Lovecraft’s Fiction

Lovecraft’s antiquarian writings and his fiction are difficult to sepa-
rate. He wrote fiction during his travels, he wrote travelogues at home,
and his travel writings influenced his fiction in all kinds of ways. For
one thing, very often his stories are about travel, and many of them
are about architectural walking tours. In addition, Lovecraft drew
upon his experiences with and knowledge of colonial and New Eng-
land folklore as he crafted background and atmosphere in his novels

and short narratives.
Many of his earlier stories, such as “The Picture in the House”
(1920) and “He” (1925), begin with protagonists on walking tours who
literally stumble into the past (or into ghostly survivals of the past in
the present). The tales typically begin with an outsider entering an
area, describing its landscape in picturesque terms, and then exploring
its history and character in greater depth. These narratives are about
tourists, but their antiquarian explorations become suffused with
horror. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the experiences that were his greatest
source of pleasure transmute into sources of despair, as rottenness is
uncovered at the core of tradition.
For instance, the protagonist of “The Festival” (1923) comes to
the Massachusetts coastal town of Kingsport on a good Colonial Re-
vival quest to discover his ancestral New England roots. “Beyond the
hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily . . . snowy Kingsport with
its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves
and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; . . . ceaseless mazes of
colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels” (1986:209).
His explorations lead him to witness a terrifying rite that literally takes
place under the town. He flees; when he returns, he finds a modern
Kingsport filled with “the sounds of trolleys and motors,” “in which only
about one in five [houses] was ancient” (216). This story is a fairly direct
transformation of Lovecraft’s explorations of Marblehead, Massachu-
setts, in which he felt he had “sojourned for a time in the past.” “The
Music of Erich Zann” (1921) also involves an historic neighborhood
that is a touch point for a cosmic meeting, and which the protagonist
is later unable to find. Many other stories are about walking, a central
metaphor in Lovecraft’s fiction: in stories like “The Outsider” (1921)
and “The Haunter of the Dark”(1935), characters leave their homes
driven by curiosity, going for walks that reveal horrific truths—truths
that make their homes inaccessible or insecure.
Characters in later stories travel by automobile (“The Whisperer
in Darkness,” 1930), bus (“The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 1931), and
even airplane (At the Mountains of Madness, 1931). “The Whisperer in
Darkness” contains a long description of the folklorist-hero’s drive
from Brattleboro, Vermont, into the Green Mountains, an episode
that draws heavily on Lovecraft’s account of his own drive along the
same route in 1927 (Lovecraft 1995:293–96). The drive ends at a
New England connected farmstead (a folk form characteristic of the

region),12 which becomes the site of a meeting with extraterrestrials
(Lovecraft 1984:248–49). The opening of “The Dunwich Horror”
(1928), a story about miscegenation and human/alien hybrids set in
backwoods Massachusetts, reads very much like a travelogue. It begins,
“When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong cor-
ner at the junction of Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corner he
comes upon a lonely and curious country” (1984:155–56). By taking
the wrong turn, the traveler leaves behind the prescriptive tourist route
and visits a “back region” (MacCannell 1976:91–107) unknown to most
tourists, a region at once authentic and threatening, untouched by
commercialism and therefore in touch with the cosmic.
Lovecraft’s ultimate transformation of travelogue into horror story
is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The protagonist of this 1931 short
story, an antiquarian in Lovecraft’s mold, arrives in the decayed co-
lonial town of Innsmouth by bus, checks his bags into the one seedy
hotel, and embarks on a “systematic though half bewildered” architec-
tural walking tour (Lovecraft 1984:324). Like Dunwich, Innsmouth is
virtually unknown to outsiders, and its lack of prosperity has preserved
its colonial landscape. Much of the story is an exploration of the ar-
chitecture and history of the town; the physical description is based
on Lovecraft’s explorations of Newburyport and other economically
depressed communities on the north shore of Massachusetts Bay. Dis-
covering that the town is populated by the semi-human offspring of
New Englanders and sea monsters (a fantastic recasting of the theme
of “The Street”), the protagonist flees.
Folklore and Vernacular Architecture in Lovecraft’s Fiction

An amateur enthusiast of the sciences and humanities of his day, H. P.
Lovecraft was familiar with many of the popular and scholarly sources
on folklore (a term that in Lovecraft’s day referred primarily to oral
folklore and belief) in the English language. His personal library
included the works of European authorities, such as Walter Scott, J.
G. Frazer and Sabine Baring-Gould; well known collections of folk
narratives such as Aesop’s Fables, The 1001 Arabian Nights, and works by
the Grimm Brothers; numerous collections of American legends and
beliefs (including works by Samuel Adams Drake, Lafcadio Hearn,
and Charles M. Skinner); and “primary sources” on early American
folklore such as Cotton Mather (Joshi 2002). Such sources served as

guides for Lovecraft’s fieldwork and for his fiction. Like many intellec-
tuals of his day, he accepted the analytical frameworks of nineteenth-
century anthropologists, such as E. B. Tylor and John Fiske, which
placed folklore into a universal, linear scheme of cultural evolution,
with European civilization at the top of the evolutionary tree. He was,
apparently, unaware of contemporaries such as Franz Boas who were
rejecting this model in favor of cultural relativism. Many of the older
or more conservative folklorists of the day, including Charles Skinner,
Henry Shoemaker, and John Lomax, also were either unaware of or
unwilling to accept relativistic models of culture.
Lovecraft used actual folklore in his fiction, though he often
transformed it. For example, “The Shunned House” (1924)—about a
vampiric ghost that haunts a house for generations until it is dispelled
by the narrator—draws on a number of sources. Set in an actual Provi-
dence house (135 Benefit Street, built in 1764), the story makes use
of the home’s architecture and history, but also incorporates elements
of the Andrew Joline House (1735), which had been discovered by
Lovecraft on an antiquarian ramble through Elizabeth, New Jersey. In
addition, the ghost in the story is based on local Rhode Island vampire
legends, probably collected from a combination of oral and written
sources, and a haunted house legend from Schenectady, New York,
taken from a book by Charles M. Skinner (Bell 2001:178–90; Joshi and
Schultz 2001:242–44; Shreffler 1977:92–94; Skinner 1900:76–77).
Many other Lovecraft stories make use of folk legends and beliefs.
“The Unnameable” (1923) is a particularly illuminating example (in-
teresting for Lovecraft’s sources and intentions more than for its suc-
cess as a story, which is essentially a defense of the aesthetics of horror
literature). The setting is a realistically described seventeenth-century
cemetery and house, based on the Charter Street Burying Ground in
Salem, Massachusetts, which Lovecraft had visited and documented.
The plot concerns a skeptic who is convinced of the reality of the
supernatural by encountering the “unnameable.” The story incorpo-
rates elements of a Puritan New England legend about a monstrous
birth and its aftermath taken from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi
Americana (1702:344–45; see Joshi and Schultz 2001:283–84). It also
incorporates several motifs: the window that retains the image of a
dead person, and the mad or monstrous relative locked away in an
attic. In his correspondence, Lovecraft gives an extended account
of his experiences with oral versions of both these beliefs (Lovecraft

1965–76, 2:139), which he also encountered in books.
In “The Dunwich Horror,” major themes and events are quite
original to Lovecraft, but many of the details are folkloric, gathered
from different parts of New England and used to add “local color”
and authenticity. For example, whippoorwills: Lovecraft had encoun-
tered, in an 1879 collection of Rhode Island folklore, the belief that
whippoorwills are harbingers of death, and in fact can hasten death
with their cries (Hazard 1879:138; Ringel 1995:185–86). On a 1928
antiquarian trip to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, he encountered the
belief that (in his own words) these birds “are psychopomps lying in
wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in
unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath” (Lovecraft 1995:477). In
“The Dunwich Horror,” whippoorwills are said to try to capture the
soul as it leaves the body: if they fail, their cries cease and they soon
disperse, but if they succeed, “their shrill voices burst into a kind of
pandaemoniac cachinnation” that lasts for hours.
Lovecraft also drew on legends about the New England landscape,
combining, again, material he encountered in books and collected
from oral circulation. Many of the hills around Dunwich are said to
be topped with stone circles, a belief encountered by Lovecraft in
several parts of New England. Strange noises come from the ground,
especially at times of occult significance, such as Halloween. Here,
Lovecraft drew once again from the works of Samuel Adams Drake,
who wrote about the “Moodus” noises reported to come from the
ground at regular intervals in certain parts of Connecticut (Drake
1906:427–29; Ringel 1995:64).
The use of folk narratives and beliefs in his stories served to give
them an air of verisimilitude; in the same way, Lovecraft’s use of mate-
rial culture, especially architecture, gave his stories a grounding in the
real world. Architecture plays a central role in a good many horror
stories, both oral and written, but architecture to Lovecraft was not a
gothic cliché; rather, as we have seen, it was one of his prime interests.
He rarely used the medieval castles and abbeys of the gothic writers;
in architectural terms, Lovecraft was not so much a gothic writer as a
colonial revival one.
In the novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), the autobiographi-
cal protagonist grows up in the Halsey Mansion, an actual Federal/
Adamesque mansion on top of College Hill rumored in Lovecraft’s time
to be haunted (Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 24 August 1925, Lovecraft

Papers). He spends much of his youth on antiquarian rambles through
Providence, allowing for some quite detailed accounts of architecture
and the cultural landscape of the town. In “The Shadow over Inns-
mouth,” lengthy descriptions of decayed colonial houses and churches
prefigure the protagonist’s discovery of the decay and corruption of the
people who live in them. In “The Picture in the House” (1920), “The
Shunned House” (1924), and “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932),
the action takes place almost entirely within a single dwelling, described
in detail. In the latter story, based on the so-called witch house of Salem,
the protagonist is literally drawn into another dimension by the house’s
architectural form. His explorations of other dimensions are paralleled
by somnambulistic walks through the streets of Arkham.
Lovecraft’s stories about extraterrestrials also rely heavily on ar-
chitecture. A familiar sense of place, embodied in colonial New Eng-
land architecture, was central to Lovecraft’s sense of security; hence,
an actual Italian Catholic church in Providence may be an abode of
monsters, as it becomes in “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935). But if
“foreign” architecture is frightening, the ultimate embodiment of fear
is non-human architecture, which has no relationship to familiar forms
or aesthetics. Lovecraft criticized modern architecture for rejecting
tradition and believed that new architecture, to be livable, must draw
on traditional symbols (a rather post-modern idea); it follows that ar-
chitecture lacking in such symbols would be a terrifying embodiment
of cosmic alienage (Lovecraft 1995:190–98). Lengthy descriptions of
non-human architecture are used to create such an atmosphere in
“The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), At the Mountains of Madness (1931), and
“The Shadow Out of Time” (1935).
Lovecraft used folklore and material culture in his stories in two
interrelated ways: to create a sense of place and to evoke the past.
Setting is so crucial in most of his stories that it cannot be separated
from character. Lovecraft saw place, or groundedness, as the center
of his own identity and the basis for any true art or civilization. This
groundedness must be based on history and tradition. “All genuine
art,” he wrote, “is local and rooted in the soil. . . . [C]reative artistic
force is always provincial and nationalistic.” What is more, he writes,
“That ethereal sense of identity with my own native & hereditary soil
& institutions is the one essential condition of intellectual life” (Love-
craft 1965–76, 2:131).
A profound dualism—nostalgia and terror, beauty and disgust—

runs through Lovecraft’s attitude toward New England, toward tradi-
tion, and toward his own heritage, and it also permeates his stories.
In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the hero’s antiquarian travels and
genealogical research lead him first to uncover the terrible secrets of
the town, and then to confront the even more terrible secret of his
own ancestry; they eventually transform him into a monster. Similarly,
while Lovecraft took pride in his Puritan New England ancestors, he
could not forget that both his parents died in psychiatric hospitals.
The Invention of Tradition

To Lovecraft, folklore was the body of knowledge and aesthetic forms
passed down through tradition, within a “hereditary culture stream”
(Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:229). Since both “tradition” and “folklore” only
have such meanings as are given to them by human beings in specific
contexts, Lovecraft felt free to invent his own folklore. But Lovecraft
also wanted to connect his lore to materials already “out there”—that
is, he built on existing tradition.
Lovecraft was quite critical of those who simply used or valued folklore
in literature for its own sake, without reworking it. He advocated using
“folk myths” to create “new artificial myths” (Lovecraft 1965–76, 3:293).
The most interesting thing about his own use of folklore is not so much
the incorporation of actual items or texts into his stories, but his invention
of tradition—his use of the structures, styles, and devices of folklore in
a way that gives his fiction “authenticity,” that makes it seem like folklore.
Or to put it another way, Lovecraft uses texts that are not traditional
(i.e., he wrote them), but their structure or style builds on established
patterns, they use traditional motifs within an original narrative, or they
incorporate believable contexts that give them an air of traditionality. The
stories and rituals performed by Lovecraft’s characters seem authentic
because they appear in appropriate or familiar contexts, are juxtaposed
with known folklore, or are bolstered with spurious scholarly citations.
It is often difficult in Lovecraft’s work to know where folklore stops and
authorial invention starts, and that is just the point.
Lovecraft’s protagonists very often are folklorists, or at least they
are doing the work of a folklorist as it was perceived in the 1920s and
’30s: they compile oral and written sources and document material
culture in the service of a specific research question. In “The Rats
in the Walls” (1923), a Massachusetts businessman named Delapore

restores his family’s ancestral mansion in England. In the process,
he carries out architectural, genealogical, and folkloric research,
uncovering a variety of supernatural beliefs, legends, and ballads that
portray the Delapore family as practitioners of evil magic. Lovecraft
includes the folklore texts ostensibly found by Delapore; these provide
background, create an atmosphere of suspense, and prime readers to
expect the supernatural. Examples of lore range from actual folklore
to items made up whole cloth by Lovecraft; again, the distinction
between previously collected and invented folklore is deliberately
unclear. Lovecraft drew on actual scholarly works, especially Sabine
Baring-Gould’s 1867 Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, but he also cre-
ated lore that he then attributed to scholarly sounding sources and
to oral sources (Mariconda 1995:53–55). He mentions, among many
other examples, “fireside tales” about the disappearance of villagers,
two “particularly horrible old ballads” about villainous family mem-
bers, and “the epic of the rats” (drawn from Baring-Gould), about an
army of rats that is supposed to have escaped from the mansion and
devoured several villagers.
This body of “folklore,” along with eerie descriptions of architecture
and landscape, provides both ambience and clues for the reader about
what is to come. Once Delapore’s house restoration is complete and he
takes up residence in the mansion, his research returns to haunt him.
Delapore hears rats in the solid stone walls that no one else can hear.
They draw him down below the house into an immense, secret twilit
grotto in which he finds remains of increasingly ancient architectural
edifices: medieval, Roman, druidic, Neolithic, and so on. This physi-
cal and architectural descent parallels a linguistic descent as Delapore
lapses into medieval dialect, then into Latin, Gaelic, and Stone Age
languages. As the protagonist descends through madness and canni-
balism into another world, he retraces the physical and metaphysical
evolution of his own being, eventually descending through an interior
landscape into a world of the numinous and mystical, losing himself
as he merges with the inhuman. Here, Lovecraft’s narrative draws on
the theories of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists such
as Tylor, Frazer, Spencer, and others who tended to see folklore as
survivals of early stages of culture. In “The Rats in the Walls,” traces
of tradition serve both to open up another world and to foreshadow
the protagonist’s descent into the irrational and prehuman.
“The Rats in the Walls” is one of Lovecraft’s most “gothic” stories

and was arguably the culmination of his early, more conventional fic-
tion. Much of its horror derives from the tension between the author’s
love for the antiquated and his engagement with theories of cultural
evolution that saw these things as obsolete, doomed survivals. Just as
the concept of cultural evolution upon which this story was based was
being superseded in Lovecraft’s lifetime, so the focus of his own stories
shifted from protagonists who descend the human family tree (“Arthur
Jermyn” [1920], “The Lurking Fear” [1922]), to those who encounter
cultural or biological hybridity13 (“The Dunwich Horror” [1928], “The
Shadow over Innsmouth” [1931]), to those who communicate with
alien cultures (“The Whisperer in Darkness” [1930], “The Shadow
Out of Time” [1935]). Evolutionary cultural models are a source of
horror in Lovecraft’s stories; as he moved away from them in his later
work, his cultural “others” became less threatening.
In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” protagonist Albert Wilmarth, “an
instructor of literature at Miskatonic University” and “enthusiastic
amateur student of New England folklore,” collects stories connected
to the Vermont floods of November 1927 (an actual event). Beginning
with newspaper clippings about bloated bodies of humans and ani-
mals that were seen floating down flooded rivers (again, an historical
phenomenon), Wilmarth soon collects descriptions from both print
and oral circulation about monstrous submerged bodies. He then
seeks out old published sources on New England folklore, including
“the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces
material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the
state.” This and other materials convince Wilmarth that the recent
sightings of monstrous forms are based on older legends, and, in true
comparative manner, he draws parallels with the folklore of Puritans,
Irish Americans, and Native Americans. He also continues to track
down oral sources, until a trip into the Green Mountains to interview
a knowledgeable informant leads him to the New England connected
farmstead populated by the extraterrestrials whose bodies had been
spotted in the rivers. Once again, folklore, real or invented, serves as a
gateway to another world—in this case, not to the inner world of “The
Rats in the Walls,” but to a meeting with an extraterrestrial civilization.
For Lovecraft, the traditional opens paths to the cosmic, to infinities
both internal and external.
Tradition not only expands plot possibilities, but it also gives them
weight. Like “local color” writers, for instance, Lovecraft brings a sense
of authenticity and believability to his stories by incorporating oral nar-
ratives, generally told in dialect. In Lovecraft’s stories, the narratives
come in response to fieldwork by the protagonist. This is similar to
the narrative techniques used by Sarah Orne Jewett in her classic The
Country of the Pointed Firs, although Jewett’s protagonist is motivated to
ask questions from an interest in human nature, whereas Lovecraft’s
protagonists have a scholarly interest in tradition. Lovecraft’s own ex-
tensive notes on regional dialects meant that he could include plenty
of “realistic” dialogue.
“The Colour Out of Space” (1927) demonstrates this technique
particularly well, though on the surface it seems to be less “folkloric”
than many other Lovecraft stories. The plot is based on the actual
construction of Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts in the
1930s. The narrator, a surveyor hired to map a large area of “hills and
vales” in Massachusetts that will soon be buried under a reservoir, finds
an area called “the blasted heath” by locals. Nothing grows there. He
seeks out a local old-timer, Ammi Pierce, from whom he collects stories
about the place. These narratives constitute most of story. Pierce tells
of a meteorite that landed on a local farm in 1882, exhibiting bizarre
properties that local scientists cannot explain. A transformation and
decay of the local landscape then ensues, corresponding to the mental,
physical, and spiritual decay of the farm family. This deterioration is
brought about by an encounter with an unknown force, presumably
extraterrestrial, but so alien that it is beyond human understanding.
Having listened to the narrative and seen the blasted heath, the pro-
tagonist is led to resign his job and begins to avoid clear nights because
seeing the “starry voids” above makes him nervous.
Although “The Colour Out of Space” doesn’t make use of any
actual folklore texts, it uses the devices of “narratives of place” to give
authenticity. That is, Pierce’s story communicates both the sensual
qualities (such as color, texture, sound, lighting) and the emotional
qualities (attachment, sadness, uneasiness) that are part of the human
experience of place. Ammi Pierce’s love for the landscape in which
he has lived his entire life (and by extension, Lovecraft’s love for the
New England landscape) makes that landscape’s transformation all
the more disturbing. In the words of Kent Ryden, the “landscapes of
childhood” are our most meaningful places, and “when our meaningful
places are threatened, we feel threatened as well” (1993:40).
“The Colour Out of Space” displays a typically Lovecraftian com-

bination of awe and terror at the mystery of the cosmos, juxtaposed
with sadness at the losses demanded by modernity—in this case, a
landscape literally buried by a reservoir, and associated memories and
stories stripped of continued relevance. It also displays a characteristic
Lovecraft plot in which an accumulation of place-based evidence, both
folkloric and scientific, leads not to a solution (like a detective story),
but to a realization of the illusory nature of truth and the unknow-
ability of the cosmos. It is typically through tradition, through intimate
communicative forms—legends, narratives, and beliefs about places,
architecture, and human landscapes—that cosmic truths are revealed
to Lovecraft’s characters.
Many of Lovecraft’s plots unfold in a similar way, with a mixture of
actual and invented folklore, actual and invented places and buildings,
actual and invented scholarly sources, actual and invented ancient
volumes of occult lore, actual and invented historical events. This
postmodern fusion of the real and the virtual leaves most readers not
knowing where “real” ends and “virtual” begins. Some of Lovecraft’s
readers, in fact, have become convinced of the reality of his inventions,
such as his famous book of occult lore, The Necronomicon.
An excellent example of all this fusion is once again “The Shadow
over Innsmouth.” The unnamed protagonist, engaged in genealogical
research and antiquarian travels similar to those carried out regularly
by Lovecraft, is researching family roots in Newburyport, Massachusetts
(an actual town), when he hears intriguing rumors about Innsmouth,
a neighboring town that does not appear on maps but is acknowledged
in oral tradition. He finds a tiara at the Newburyport Historical Society
(a place that Lovecraft visited and describes in detail): “It was as if the
workmanship were that of another planet.” Visiting Innsmouth, he
not only surveys the architecture but makes two interview attempts.
The first, with a recent arrival who manages a chain grocery, gives an
informed outsider’s perspective on local tradition. The second, with
Zadok Allen, a local nonagenarian, produces a lengthy oral narrative,
told in dialect, which provides the reader with most of what we learn
about Innsmouth. Thus, we move from a kind of objective “mapping” of
place by an outsider, without cultural significance, to an oral narrative
by a knowledgeable local, one that gives us the meaning of the place.
Zadok’s narrative, like Ammi Pierce’s in “The Colour Out of Space,”
charts the transformation of a beloved New England place into some-
thing alien. During Zadok’s childhood in the 1830s, Innsmouth had

been a thriving center of maritime trade. While in the South Pacific,
the town’s most prominent merchant had come into contact with the
“Deep Ones,” a species of intelligent amphibians presumably of extra-
terrestrial origin. In return for large amounts of gold jewelry and an
assurance of continual successful fishing on “Devil’s Reef” just off of
Innsmouth, the merchant and his followers agree to intermarry with
the Deep Ones and adopt their religion. Those who don’t agree are
killed in a “riot.” The resulting offspring look human during child-
hood, but gradually transform into Deep Ones and eventually go to
live in the ocean, where they are immortal. The town gradually decays
as it is shunned by outsiders, and the interests of its inhabitants turn
more and more to the ocean.
After listening to this narrative of miscegenation and the loss of
tradition (or rather, the replacement of New England traditions with
alien traditions), the narrator finds himself pursued by the locals, who
don’t want him to leave town with the knowledge he has acquired.
Although he manages to escape, the narrator undergoes his own
transformation as a result of his genealogical ties to Innsmouth. As
he changes physically and psychologically, a narrative of the loss of
a New England homeland becomes an embrace of the heritage of
the Deep Ones, knowledge of which he obtains through dreams or
a kind of ancestral memory. Eventually he plans a different kind of
return to family roots, a voyage “to Cyclopean and many-columned
Y’ha-nthlei,” where he will “dwell in wonder and glory forever.” It is
noteworthy that the traditions of both New England and the Deep
Ones are embodied primarily by architecture, but in this case the New
England architecture is decaying and the architecture of the Deep
Ones is exotically beautiful.
The complex interplay of the protagonist’s walking tour (and later
flight) through the streets of Innsmouth and the outsider and insider
narratives offered by his “informants” constitute an ethnography of
sorts. The narrator’s journey also embodies Michel de Certeau’s ideas
about the creation of meaning in urban environments. Like Love-
craft, de Certeau conflates walking in the city with emergent cultural
forms, with the constantly forming stories and dreams that give shift-
ing meanings to the city as it is manifested in the everyday lives of its
inhabitants. In de Certeau’s terms, the physical, ethnographic, and
metaphorical walks taken by both the narrator and the readers of “The
Shadow over Innsmouth” empty the site of its apparent significance

as a colonial New England village and give it new significance as a city
of the Deep Ones (de Certeau 1984:91–110).14 As part of this process
names change, or secret names are revealed: the quintessentially New
England name “Innsmouth” changes to the alien “Y’ha-nthlei.” This
is a profound challenge to the authority of the Anglophilic, Colonial
Revival discourse so important to Lovecraft.15
There has been considerable debate about whether the end of this
story is meant to dramatize a corruption of the narrator, or whether it
constitutes a humanizing of the Deep Ones, a recognition that “alien”
traditions may be as valid as New England traditions. Lovecraft did
present aliens sympathetically in several of his late stories, a move-
ment which paralleled the abandonment of much of the racism and
anti-immigrant xenophobia that marked his upbringing. It is worth
noting that Lovecraft, who for much of his life was anti-Semitic and
horrified by miscegenation, married a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant. It
may be that the ambiguous ending of this story is deliberate; Lovecraft
is acknowledging the presence of conflicting emotions in the face of
change. In this story he mourns the loss of New England traditions
while at the same time he is learning to accept new cultures, acknowl-
edging a future in which hybrid people and cultural forms may be
recognized as the norm.
Conclusion
In his early writing, both antiquarian and fictional, Lovecraft seems
to resemble conservative figures such as Samuel Adams Drake and
William Sumner Appleton—who saw the preservation of tradition as
a way to safeguard old orders and old power structures—rather than
cultural pluralists such as Benjamin Botkin. But Lovecraft’s move-
ment toward socialism and his (albeit horrified) fascination with
hybrid forms indicates that he was being pulled reluctantly toward
a recognition of cultural mixing in America. His concern with the
preservation of tradition grew out of the New England Brahmin poli-
tics of his youth, but it evolved into a concern with twentieth-century
alienation that was surprisingly modern in many respects. An avid ama-
teur follower of astronomy and physics (for several years, he wrote
astronomy columns for local newspapers), Lovecraft felt that scienti-
fic discoveries were revealing the insignificance of humans and the
irrelevance of human cultures, traditions, and religions in the face of

incomprehensible vastness (Joshi 1999:207). He thought that Relativ-
ity and the Uncertainty Principle meant that human knowledge was
indefinite and bound to be disproved. An important theme in much
of his fiction, this perspective led him to a modernist reformulation
of the concepts of tradition and preservation.
For Lovecraft, tradition was a meaningful illusion, important for
everyday life but significant only in a relative sense, not in a cosmic
or scientific one. Traditions, he thought, won’t protect us from an
indifferent cosmos or from the evil within ourselves, but their familiar
forms and symbols are a source of comfort and continuity. Since they
are illusory rather than inherently and universally true, we can rein-
vent traditions whenever necessary, creating meaning by “imagining
realistically” within the boundaries set by tradition (Lovecraft 1965–76,
2:273). Traditions, then, become aesthetic constructs that guide the
creation of new cultural forms. Lovecraft’s defense of tradition, there-
fore, proceeds more on aesthetic than on moral grounds (in contrast,
for example, to William Morris). But since there are, to Lovecraft, no
universal moral standards, morality must be invented anew based on
aesthetics, and aesthetics are invented anew based on our perceptions
of tradition. Nothing is permanent or stable, but we must preserve
the illusions of permanence and stability. For Lovecraft, the greatest
pleasures and the closest connections to other people come through
“the joy of capturing another’s vision”—that is, through the experi-
ence of art—and this is most true for art that is the most traditional
and the most intimate—that is, folk art.16
To take a broader perspective, Lovecraft participated in the con-
tinuing fascination of American writers and intellectuals with what
Leo Marx described as “the machine’s sudden appearance in the
landscape” (1964:16). In Henry Adams’s terms, such changes juxta-
posed the “Virgin” with the “Dynamo”: the pastoral and the traditional
alongside the technological and scientific, the spiritual bumping up
against the mechanistic (Marx 1964). Lovecraft’s thought is marked
by these clashes: his simultaneous love for and horror of the old and
traditional, his pride in the greatness of American (and New Eng-
land) civilization and his conviction that twentieth-century science
and technology doomed it to obsolescence, his simultaneous fear of
and fascination with “alien” and “mixed” traditions, his combination
of atheism and the supernatural in a kind of “back-door” spirituality
(V. Nelson 2001). If Lovecraft’s love for the past and disdain for such
trends as mechanization and immigration were anti-modernist, his
fictional depictions of irruptions of the past into the present and the
cosmic into the mundane were embodiments of the characteristically
twentieth-century fear that the “solidarity of modernity” will break
down into irrationality and chaos (MacCannell 1976:83).
Lovecraft’s stories are fascinating not only because of the fears they
inscribe, but also because of their author’s creative response to those
fears. His contradictions can be viewed as a source of hybrid creativity.
In reaction to the breakdown of an older “reality” defined by tradition,
Lovecraft posited a world in which reality could be created anew by the
self-conscious artistic manipulation and creation of tradition. In reac-
tion to the destruction or transformation of beloved places, Lovecraft
invented new places. In reaction to what he perceived as the breakdown
of religion, Lovecraft created a cosmology, an alternate history of
the universe that has been called an “anti-mythology.” In reaction to
what he saw as the puerility of both religion and occultism, Lovecraft
invented his own sacred texts and rituals and documented them in
mock scholarly articles such as his 1927 “History of the Necronomicon”
(Lovecraft 1995:52–53). In reaction to the limitations of traditional
genres, Lovecraft created a new, hybrid genre that combined hor-
ror, science fiction, and regionalism. In reaction to the separation of
verbal texts from material culture, Lovecraft created a narrative form
in which, in de Certeau’s terms, speaking cannot be separated from
walking, and oral texts are intertwined with the built environment (de
Certeau 1984:103).
The invention and manipulation of folklore not only gives texture
to Lovecraft’s stories (as it does to other successful fantastic creations,
such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth), but also gives them a kind of
creative play. In his cosmology, for instance, Lovecraft drew on real and
invented traditions to create a new aesthetic, which in turn defined
a new reality. This bricolage, this creating meaning out of seemingly
unconnected bits and pieces, is seen by de Certeau and others as
characteristic of postmodernity; it is this quality more than anything
else that makes the stories of the conservative Lovecraft, who liked
to imagine himself an eighteenth-century gentleman, resonate with
audiences in the twenty-first century.
If Lovecraft felt free to borrow from others, he also invited others
to incorporate and alter his own work. Lovecraft welcomed the use of
his monsters, books, and settings in stories by his friends (writers like
Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch). Further, the open-ended and
dynamic quality of his own cosmology has motivated many writers to
create their own “Lovecraftian” stories over the years. Lovecraft’s world
has translated quite naturally into such postmodern phenomena as
role-playing games, Goth and Heavy Metal music, and into new alterna-
tive religious movements such as Neopaganism and “Chaos Magick,”
all of which share an aesthetic of creating new realities through the
idiosyncratic manipulation and invention of tradition (Luhrmann
1989:96–97; Magliocco 2001:65–70; V. Nelson 2002; Possamai 2002;
Woodman 2004). Lovecraft disliked corporate capitalism and resisted
joining organizations such as the Federal Writers’ Project or the Society
for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, so it is appropriate
that independent artistic and counter-cultural movements should
draw on his work.
It may seem like a long way from the preservation of colonial
architecture in the 1920s to twenty-first-century Neopaganism, but
Lovecraft’s work embodies changing twentieth-century attitudes
toward tradition, from perceptions of tradition as a static and vanish-
ing embodiment of the past to notions that tradition is a dynamic
phenomenon that must be self-consciously manipulated to give
meaning to our lives. For Lovecraft, the preservation and invention
of tradition were the answer to the crisis of modernity. In some of
his most passionate writing he conveys a kind of sublimity based on
a perception of tradition in which the vernacular landscape provides
a glimpse of a timeless and infinite cosmos. His 1929 sonnet “Con-
tinuity” muses,
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than these we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are. (2001:79)
Western Kentucky University

Bowling Green
Acknowledgments
Research for this essay was made possible by faculty scholarships from Western
Kentucky University and a fellowship from the John Nicholas Brown Center for
the Study of American Civilization, Brown University. I would like to thank S. T.
Joshi, Erika Brady, Gregg Nelson, Eileen Starr, and the editorial staff at the Journal
of Folklore Research for their insightful comments. S. T. Joshi not only read an early
draft, but also edited or wrote many of the primary and secondary sources on
which my work is based. I would also like to thank Michael Ann Williams, Sabina
Magliocco, the staff of the John Hay Library, and the staff of the John Nicholas
Brown Center for their help with various aspects of this project.
Notes
1. On secular threats, see the ghost stories of conservative political commenta-
tor Russell Kirk; for threats posed by modernism, the stories of Shirley Jackson
or Fritz Leiber. As will be discussed in this article, H. P. Lovecraft’s work dem-
onstrates threats from multiculturalism. For Kirk, the source of horror may be
in perceived threats to tradition, while M. R. James’s protagonists find tradition
itself threatening: James’s monsters represent a past best left forgotten. Often,
attitudes toward tradition in horror literature are ambiguous, as evident in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. While Count Dracula is an evil from the gothic past let loose
in Victorian England, there are also elements of greatness and tragedy in his
character, and his connections to the darkest traditions of medieval Europe give
him an irresistible power over the bodies and souls of his victims.
2. Raymond Williams traces the English word “tradition” to the fourteenth
century. Its earliest meaning was the transmission of knowledge and of art forms,
such as songs, from one generation to the next. As early as the fifteenth century,
“tradition” had become linked to “authenticity” and thus to duty. Since at least
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, “traditionalism” has been a politically
loaded term implying either respect for the wisdom of time-honored institu-
tions and art forms or a mindless adherence to the past for its own sake ([1976]
1983:319; Bronner 1998:9–72). Simon Bronner’s assertion that “tradition and its
expression in folklore bring out group associations and feelings of belonging to
past patterns” (1998:70) echoes Lovecraft’s concept of tradition. For him, it was
a kind of aesthetic or emotional predisposition based on “associations with the
hereditary culture stream of the beholder” (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:229).
3. Lovecraft’s letters contain many descriptions of these architectural tours.
For instance, a tour given to James F. Morton, C. M. Eddy, and Lovecraft’s aunt
(Lillian Clark) is described in a letter to Samuel Loveman dated 5 January 1924
(Lovecraft 1994:23).
4. In terms of quantity, at least, Lovecraft ranks among the great American
letter writers. S. T. Joshi has estimated that Lovecraft wrote more than 75,000
letters during his short life, including many over thirty pages and a few well over
one hundred. They contain lengthy discussions of literature, politics, philosophy,
history, and many other topics. The main repository of Lovecraft’s unpublished
letters and manuscripts is the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island. Smaller collections also exist at the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, Madison; the New York Public Library; and elsewhere. Lovecraft’s
Selected Letters, most of them heavily edited, have been published in five volumes
(Lovecraft 1965–76). S. T. Joshi’s An Index to the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft
(1991) is indispensable for the use of these volumes. In addition, at least nine
volumes of letters to specific correspondents have been published, as well as Lord
of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (Lovecraft 2000). Together, these
publications include only a small fraction of Lovecraft’s correspondence. The edi-
tors of the Selected Letters, unfortunately, tended to leave out the architectural and
antiquarian materials in favor of literary, philosophical, and personal matters.
In addition, a good many letters have been lost or remain in private hands.
5. For a later visit to Charleston, see Lovecraft to Helen Sully, 30 April 1934.
For Philadelphia, Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 9 June 1926. For St. Augustine,
Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 11 May 1931. For Key West, Lovecraft to Lillian Clark,
12 June 1931. For Savannah, Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 24 June 1931. For Nan-
tucket, Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 2 August 1934; and to Helen Sully, 2 September
1934. For Rhode Island, Lovecraft to E. Hoffman Price, 30 May 1934; to Helen
Sully, 26 July 1936; and to R. H. Barlow, 30 November 1936. All of the letters
cited can be found in the Lovecraft Papers, John Hay Library. For New Orleans,
see Lovecraft to August Derleth, 2 June 1932 and 6 June 1932, August Derleth
Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
6. Jewett and other New England local color writers, such as Mary Wilkins
Freeman, also had a gothic side, producing numerous stories of the supernatural.
Lovecraft was a fan of Wilkins Freeman (and of Lafcadio Hearn), although there
is no record that Lovecraft ever read Jewett.
7. The twelve regions are French Canadian, English (Maine to New York),
Dutch New York, English (Mid Atlantic), Pennsylvania German, Welsh in Penn-
sylvania, Swedish in Delaware, English in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia,
Spanish in Florida, French in Louisiana, and the Spanish southwest (Lovecraft to
August Derleth, 1930 [no month or day given], Derleth Papers, State Historical
Society of Wisconsin). Since his focus was European settlement, Lovecraft did
not consider African American or Native American cultures.
8. Lomax was a complex figure, whose intellectual evolution in some ways re-
sembled Lovecraft’s. Although he never completely abandoned the racism of his
southern plantation upbringing, Lomax became an (albeit patronizing) defender
of the folklore of African Americans and the working class (Mullen 2000).
9. For example, a letter regarding Brick Row and signed by James F. Morton
(Providence Sunday Journal, 22 December 1929:A5) was actually written by Love-
craft (see Lovecraft to Morton, November 1929, in Lovecraft 1965–76, 3:55–56).
A letter exists confirming that Morton signed and mailed the letter (Morton to
Lovecraft, 16 December 1929, Lovecraft Papers).
10. In 1931, Charleston set up the first historic district in the United States
controlled by zoning ordinances (Hosmer 1981:238–42).
11. Lovecraft owned several of Drake’s books and recommended them to
his friends. In a letter to Richard Searight, Lovecraft described Drake: “This
writer—although not wholly exempt from Victorian unctuousness and florid-
ity—is really admirably interesting and accurate” (1992:21–22).
12. In these farmsteads, house, barn, and outbuildings are physically con-
nected. On the New England connected farmstead, see Noble 1984:37–39.
13. Theories of the hybrid in recent anthropology, folklore, and popular cul-
ture studies focus on the creation of new forms and genres through the blending
or cross-fertilization of old forms and genres. Hybrid theory often focuses on
ways colonialist discourse extends a biologically based metaphor, marginalizing
the hybrid by labeling it “impure” or “mongrel.” The latter was a favorite term
of Lovecraft’s, and miscegenation and cultural mixing were major sources of
horror in his stories. In this he rather resembled the American folklorist and
novelist Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), whose ethnographic travels and fascina-
tion with folklore became the basis for a gothic literature that focused on the
hybrid (Bronner 2002:31–32).
14. My idea of using de Certeau to analyze “The Shadow over Innsmouth” owes
a debt to Gregg Nelson’s excellent M.A. thesis, “Architecture in the Fiction of
H. P. Lovecraft” (2002).
15. Just as Lovecraft uses nonhuman architecture to provoke unease, unfa-
miliarity as a source of horror is evident in his use of names. His characters and
imagined New England towns have very Anglo names, whereas the names of aliens
and alien places are unpronounceable (Cthulhu, R’lyeh, Y’ha-nthlei).
16. The most direct and succinct statement of Lovecraft’s ideas on vernacular
aesthetics is in his letter to Woodburn Harris (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:287–314).
References Cited
Manuscript Collections
Derleth, August. Papers. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.
Lovecraft, H. P., Papers. John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Books and Articles

Baring-Gould, Sabine
[1867] n.d. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. Reprint ed. Kila, Montana: Kessinger.
Bealle, John
1994 “Another Look at Charles M. Skinner.” Western Folklore 53/2:99–123.
Bell, Michael E.
2001 Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. New York: Carroll
and Graf.
Bronner, Simon J.
1998 Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture. Logan:
Utah State University Press.
2002 “Introduction: Lafcadio Hearn’s America.” In Lafcadio Hearn’s America,
ed. Simon J. Bronner, 1–33. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Burleson, Donald R.
1983 H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Butler, William
1985 “Another City upon a Hill: Litchfield, Connecticut, and the Colonial
Revival.” In The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod, 15–51.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Conforti, Joseph A.
2001 Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims
to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
de Certeau, Michel
1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Drake, Samuel Adams
1873 Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston. Boston: James R. Os-
good.
1875 Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast. New York: Harper and Broth-
ers.
1906 A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry. 2d ed.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.
Hazard, Thomas Robinson
1879 Recollections of Olden Times: Rowland Robinson of Narragansett and His Un-
fortunate Daughter. Newport, R.I.: John P. Sanborn.
Hearn, Lafcadio
2002 Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials. Edited by
Simon J. Bronner. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Higham, John
1965 Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. New York:
Atheneum.
Hirsch, Jerrold
2003 Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Hosmer, Charles B.
1981 Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926–1949.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Jewett, Sarah Orne
[1896] 1956 The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. Garden City, N.J.:
Doubleday.
Joshi, S. T.
1991 An Index to the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft. 2d ed. West Warwick, R.I.:
Necronomicon Press.
1996 H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press.
1999 A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. Gillette,
N.J.: Wildside Press.
2002 Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalog. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz
2001 An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Kammen, Michael
1991 Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kapchan, Deborah A., and Pauline Turner Strong
1999 “Theorizing the Hybrid.” Journal of American Folklore 112/445:239–53.
Lears, T. J. Jackson
1981 No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture,
1880–1920. New York: Pantheon.
Lindgren, James M.
1995 Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remak-
ing of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lovecraft, H. P.
1965–76 Selected Letters. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (vols.
1–3) and August Derleth and James Turner (vols. 4–5). 5 vols. Sauk
City, Wisc.: Arkham House.
1976 To Quebec and the Stars. Edited by L. Sprague de Camp. West Kingston,
R.I.: Donald M. Grant.
1984 The Dunwich Horror and Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Rev. ed. Sauk City,
Wisc.: Arkham House. Original ed. August Derleth.
1985 At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Rev.
ed. Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House. Original ed. August Derleth.
1986 Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Rev. ed. Sauk City,
Wisc.: Arkham House. Original ed. August Derleth.
1992 Letters to Richard F. Searight. Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi.
West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press.
1994 Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett. Edited by S. T. Joshi and
David E. Schultz. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press.
1995 Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham
House.
2000 Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Edited by S. T. Joshi
and David E. Schultz. Columbus: Ohio University Press.
2001 The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Edited by
S. T. Joshi. San Francisco: Nightshade Books.
Lovett-Graff, Bennett
1997 “Shadows over Lovecraft: Reactionary Fantasy and Immigrant Eugenics.”
Extrapolation 38/3:175–92.
Luhrmann, Tanya M.
1989 Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
MacCannell, Dean
1976 The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken
Books.
Magliocco, Sabina
2001 Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars. Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi.
Mariconda, Steven J.
1995 On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations. West Warwick, R.I.:
Necronomicon Press.
Marx, Leo
1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mather, Cotton
1702 Magnalia Christi Americana or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England.
Hartford, Conn.: n.p.
Mullen, Patrick B.
2000 “The Dilemma of Representation in Folklore Studies: The Case of
Henry Truvillion and John Lomax.” Journal of Folklore Research 37/2–3:
155–83.
Munro, Wilfred H.
1881 Picturesque Rhode Island. Providence, R.I.: J. A. and R. A. Reid.
Nelson, Gregg
2002 “Architecture in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.” M. A. thesis, University
of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
Nelson, Victoria
2001 The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
2002 “Who Likes Lovecraft? The Worshipful World of Fantasy Fandom.” Paper
presented at the Seminar in American Civilization lecture series, John
Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, Brown
University, Providence, R.I.
Noble, Allen G.
1984 Wood, Brick and Stone: The North American Settlement Landscape. Vol. 2,
Barns and Farm Structures. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Possamai, Adam
2002 “Cultural Consumption of History and Popular Culture in Alternative
Spiritualities.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2/2:197–218.
Ringel, Faye
1995 New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from
the Seventeenth through the Twentieth Centuries. Lewiston, NY: Edward
Mellen.
Ryden, Kent C.
1993 Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
Shackleton, Robert
1916 The Book of Boston. Philadelphia: Penn Publishing.
Shaffer, Marguerite S.
2001 See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Shreffler, Philip A.
1977 The H. P. Lovecraft Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Skinner, Charles M.
1900 Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Philadelphia, Penn.: J. P. Lip-
pincott.
Solomon, Barbara Miller
1956 Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Thwing, Annie H.
1920 The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630–1822. Boston: Marshall
Jones.
Whiteside, Clara Walker

1926 Touring New England on the Trail of the Yankee. Philadelphia, Penn.: Penn
Publishing.
Williams, Raymond
[1976] 1983 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Woodman, Justin
2004 “Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the Demonic in
‘Lovecraftian Magick.’” Journal for the Academic Study of Magic 1/2:13–47.

A Last Defense Against The Dark

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Last Defense Against The Dark

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Timothy H.

A Last Defense against the Dark:

In a cosmos without absolute values . . . there is only one anchor of ﬁxity . . . ,

THE R EL ATIONSHIP OF folklore to literature is complex. While writers

loss of tradition in the present. Much horror literature is predicated

Tradition and Lovecraft’s Writing

which [he] was born” (Lovecraft 1965–76, 2:228). He embarked on

varied from New England patricians such as Samuel Adams Drake to

1934, Lovecraft Papers). Lovecraft was also interested in dialect; he

Travel Writing and Heritage Tourism

anxieties” (241). Dean MacCannell describes a similar phenomenon

Many of his contemporaries in the emerging historic preservation

After viewing a recently constructed Spanish Colonial suburb near St.

The Colonial Revival Movement

preservation. The antiquarian, folklorist, and preservationist Samuel

However, Lovecraft’s politics changed in the 1930s from conserva-

gutting their interiors and installing modern, ﬁreproof materials. He

Ideology, Travel Writing, and Lovecraft’s Fiction

Drake is perhaps the greatest exemplar of Colonial Revival travel

Antiquarian Explorers in Lovecraft’s Fiction

land folklore as he crafted background and atmosphere in his novels

New England connected farmstead (a folk form characteristic of the

Folklore and Vernacular Architecture in Lovecraft’s Fiction

folklore such as Cotton Mather (Joshi 2002). Such sources served as

of his experiences with oral versions of both these beliefs (Lovecraft

to be haunted (Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 24 August 1925, Lovecraft

A profound dualism—nostalgia and terror, beauty and disgust—

The Invention of Tradition

in the Walls” (1923), a Massachusetts businessman named Delapore

“The Rats in the Walls” is one of Lovecraft’s most “gothic” stories

“The Colour Out of Space” displays a typically Lovecraftian com-

thing alien. During Zadok’s childhood in the 1830s, Innsmouth had

Shadow over Innsmouth” empty the site of its apparent signiﬁcance

irrelevance of human cultures, traditions, and religions in the face of

Western Kentucky University

Books and Articles

Whiteside, Clara Walker

You might also like