H. P. Lovecraft died in poverty, with no book of his stories published in his lifetime, yet he has come to be recognised as perhaps the 20th-century's leading author of supernatural fiction. This book traces his work and life, spent largely in Providence, Rhode Island, and shows how Lovecraft was engaged in the political, economic, social and intellectual currents of his time, and how his thought influenced his writings. Lovecraft's reaction to World War I, the Jazz Age, and the Depression, as well as to literary modernism and scientific advance, affected his thought and work so that by the end of his life he had become a mechanistic materialist and a cosmic regionalist who looked to his New England heritage as a bulwark against the meaningless of a godless cosmos.