For more than fifty years, Ken Faig, Jr. has been a leading scholar and researcher on the life and work of H. P. Lovecraft. Over the decades he has made landmark discoveries that have clarified many aspects of Lovecraft's life, ancestry, and the influence of his personal experiences upon his weird fiction. In this new volume of essays, Faig continues his pioneering work in illuminating the obscurer corners of the people and places associated with the writer from Providence, R.I.
A long piece on Lovecraft's English ancestry-his paternal forbears came from the county of Devonshire, in the southwest corner of England-traces the Lovecraft or Lovecroft name back to the 15th century. An essay on Lovecraft's uncle by marriage, Edward F. Gamwell, clarifies how this figure influenced his nephew's early writing. Faig also writes detailed histories of Lovecraft's first two residences in Providence, 454 and 598 Angell Street.
Amateur journalism was a lifelong hobby of Lovecraft's, and Faig has done extensive research on the members of the Providence Amateur Press Club and on his occasional nemesis, the literary radical Elsie Alice Gidlow. Faig also directs attention to the interplay between Lovecraft's life and work as exhibited in such tales as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and "The Dreams in the Witch House."
Ken Faig, Jr. uses all the research tools at his disposal-from early maps of Providence to census records to tidbits found in Lovecraft's extant letters-to paint a fuller portrait of Lovecraft and his world, enriching our understanding of the man and his work.