H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham
Taught by David Goodwin
David J. Goodwin is a freelance writer and public speaker and a past Frederick Lewis Allen Room scholar at the New York Public Library. He is the author of Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, a biography of the horror writer’s New York years. His first book, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, received the J. Owen Grundy History Award in 2018. He has written for Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, The Metropole, The Providence Journal, Strand Magazine, and Urban Archive.
Location: Prospect Heights Brainery (190 Underhill Ave in Prospect Heights, BK)
Did you know that the influential and controversial horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, the imagination behind “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” once called New York and Brooklyn home? On April 17, 1926—one hundred years ago!—he said “good-bye to all that” after two years of struggling to earn his keep as a writer in New York, fleeing to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.
On this anniversary of Lovecraft’s departure from New York, author and historian David J. Goodwin will invite us to discover the horror master’s Gotham. We’ll learn about Lovecraft’s writing circle, his love for Automats, his crummy Brooklyn apartment, and his favorite places in the five boroughs. Lovecraft’s experiences and time in New York shaped his life and fiction and hardened his troubling beliefs on immigration and race.
