For decades, David Goudsward has been a leading authority on the obscurer historical and topographical corners of his native New England. In this lavish and detailed treatise, he has written the definitive treatment of Lovecraft's connections with the Merrimack Valley of coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Goudsward traces Lovecraft's initial visits in the 1920s to such towns as Newburyport, Haverhill, and Hampstead, where he met such colleagues as Charles W. "Tryout" Smith, Myrta Alice Little, and Edgar J. Davis. Later visits clearly inspired many of the topographical features in such...

Edith Miniter (1867-1934), the shy, bookish young woman who ventured into amateur journalism from Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1883 became the guiding spirit of Boston amateur journalists for the thirty years she spent in that city; her friend H. P. Lovecraft compared Mrs. Miniter's fiction with that of Jane Austen.
Despite her obvious enjoyment of amateur friendships and politics, she never abandoned her primary mission as a writer. Edith Miniter wrote from the heart about her native New England, and sought to depict the reality of old ways in the face of the changes wrought by modern...