Letters to Family and Family Friends, Volume 2

As this volume opens, we see H. P. Lovecraft in desperate straits, stuck in New York City, a city he had come to loathe, and in a marriage that was failing by the day. His aunt Lillian D. Clark extended a lifeline to him by inviting him to return to Providence, R.I., and he jumped at the chance. Where exactly his wife, Sonia H. Greene, fitted into the new scheme was unclear. Lovecraft’s ecstatic return to his native city unleashed a burst of creativity over the next year, when he wrote some of his most acclaimed fiction. In addition, he began traveling more and more widely, and each summer saw him venture farther and farther up and down the Eastern Seaboard. The letters to Lillian and his other aunt, Annie E. P. Gamwell, chronicle these voyages—to Vermont, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charleston, St. Augustine, and all the way down to Key West. After Lillian died in 1932, Lovecraft and Annie were all that was left of the House of Phillips. His later letters to her tell of the extreme economies he had to practice in the wake of his increasing poverty. But his letters to Annie’s friend Marian F. Bonner are delightful epistles in which his love of cats, and also of his hometown, come to the fore. The book concludes with Whipple Phillips’s letters to his toddler grandson in the 1890s. The volume has been edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, two leading authorities on Lovecraft, with careful preparation of the text and exhaustive annotations.