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Rhode Island Literature
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
A Providence native and author of horror stories and novels, Lovecraft is considered the father of American science fiction and a successor to Edgar Allen Poe. He is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos stories. Some of his stories describe an imaginary place named Arkham that was based Providence. He was born in 1890 at the house currently numbered 454 Angell Street. The boy’s father, a salesman, went mad, was institutionalized, and died when the young Lovecraft was 5. For all his life, Lovecraft suffered from terrifying nightmares. He grew up on the fringe of New England upper society, but suffered from poor health and an overprotective mother. He was a copious reader, discovering The Arabian Nights, Greek mythology, and Edgar Allan Poe at an early age. His fascination with the macabre and weird may have begun with the stories he heard from his grandfather, who, along with his mother and two aunts, helped raise the boy.
After two and half years of high school, he had a nervous breakdown and failed to finish his work for a diploma. However, he was fascinated by science and he began writing about science and astronomy for magazines and local newspapers. The publisher of Weird Tales magazine became interested the young Rhode Island recluse and bought everything Lovecraft wrote. Lovecraft’s mother died when the author was 31 and he lived thereafter with his two aunts. He had a short, two-year marriage in the mid-1920s and spent some time living in New York, which he hated. His fiction turned from the nostalgic (The Shunned House) to the bleak and misanthropic (The Horror at Red Hook and He). In 1926 he moved back to Providence. There, he wrote some of his greatest fiction, from The Call of Cthulhu to At the Mountains of Madness to The Shadow Out of Time. He had found his niche as a writer of weird fiction and correspondence. He died of cancer in 1937 and was buried in Swan Point Cemetery.
The Gravestone of H. P. Lovecraft
Swan Point Cemetery
585 Blackstone Blvd.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906 
Phone: 401-272-1314 or 401-272-3570
Hours: Open Daily 7:30am-5pm
When Lovecraft died in 1937, his name was added to a family monument. It was not until many years later that this individual monument was erected at his gravesite.
H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Plaque
John Hay Library
20 Prospect St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02910
Phone: 401-863-3723
Erected on the centennial of his birth (August 20, 1990), this plaque is just north of the entrance to the John Hay Library, where most of Lovecraft’s original manuscripts are kept.
598 Angell St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
Lovecraft’s home from 1904 to 1924, when he married and moved to New York for the following two years.
10 Barnes St.
Providence, Rhode Island 02906
This was the home of Lovecraft from April 1926 to May 1933. This house’s address was listed as that of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Clement C. Moore (1779-1863)
A man known throughout the Western world as the author of the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and who created the sentimental image of Christmas at home, was born in 1779, in a large estate that cover the present-day area of 18th to 24th streets between Eighth and Tenth avenues in Manhattan. He was the son of Benjamin Moore, Episcopal bishop of New York, rector of Trinity Church, and president of Columbia College. Moore graduated first in his class from Columbia University in 1798. He became a well-known and respected scholar and wrote on a wide variety of topics such as religion, languages, politics, and poetry. When he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1822, at the age of 43, Moore was a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Moore, who wished to be remembered for his scholarly work, was embarrassed for most of his life that his scholarly works were overshadowed by the poem, which he considered a trivial work. Nevertheless, it has become a beloved classic. He died in Newport, his summer home, in 1863, just before his 84th birthday.
Cedars, Clement C. Moore House, or The Night
Before Christmas House
25 Catherine St.
Newport, Rhode Island 02840
Now divided into apartments, the house (c. 1856) is where Moore died after long and fruitful life. There is no truth to the myth that he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” here, because he did not begin summering in Newport until about the 1850s.
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