I Am Providence

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence on August twentieth, eighteen ninety, and he never really wanted to leave. He spent most of his life in a series of houses on the East Side, absorbing the architecture of College Hill, the Georgian facades, the gambrel roofs, the narrow lanes that dead-ended in views of the bay, and translating them into the geography of a fictional universe so thoroughly mapped that readers still treat it as real.

He left once, for New York, and disliked it enough that he returned in nineteen twenty-six and did not leave again. From ten Barnes Street, where he lived until nineteen thirty-three, and then from sixty-six Prospect Street, his final address, he wrote the stories that built his reputation: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the last of which scholars have called, in part, a novel about Providence itself.

Lovecraft died on March fifteenth, nineteen thirty-seven, of intestinal cancer, at forty-six years old. He was buried at Swan Point Cemetery. For forty years the grave had no stone. In nineteen seventy-seven, fans raised money and erected a marker. They chose as its inscription a phrase from his personal correspondence: "I Am Providence." It is one of the more unusual headstones in American literary history, an epitaph the writer composed himself without knowing it was one.

The city he wrote about was always real Providence, the Providence of fog on the hill, of old houses with too many rooms, of a harbor that seemed to lead somewhere other than the open ocean. He made the familiar uncanny. Readers have been coming to College Hill to feel what he described ever since.