Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel

This fourth volume of Lovecraft’s collected essays contains his complete travel writings, one of the most distinctive and heartwarming segments of his work. During the last decade of his life, Lovecraft devoted nearly every summer to extensive travels up and down the eastern seaboard, from Quebec to Key West, in search of antiquarian oases. He came to love the town of Charleston, South Carolina, second only to his native city of Providence, Rhode Island. His trip to Vermont in 1927, recorded in his essay “Vermont—A First Impression,” was instrumental in the writing of “The Whisperer in Darkness” three years later. “Observations on Several Parts of America” (1928) and “Travels in the Provinces of America” (1929) reveal, in a flawless replication of eighteenth-century English, his fascination with such locales as Philadelphia, Maryland, and Virginia. “A Description of the Town of Quebeck” (1930–31) is his single longest work, longer than any of his tales; it is printed here for the first time in a corrected text. Also included is the curious pseudo-travelogue “European Glimpses” (1932), ghostwritten for his ex-wife, Sonia, and a previously unpublished travelogue telling of his trip to the Fairbanks house (1636) and the Red Horse Tavern in Massachusetts. All texts are exhaustively annotated, with critical and bibliographical notes, by S.T. Joshi.