Unknown to many fans and readers, the influential and controversial horror author H. P. Lovecraft—the creative mind behind such stories as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”—lived and wrote in New York City between 1924 and 1926. During this time, Greenwich Village became his favorite neighborhood. Often in the dark hours of the night, Lovecraft lost himself in its maze of streets and alleys. He visited Greenwich Village not to fraternize with its poets and painters, but to savor the neighborhood’s architecture and buildings. However, his encounters with its immigrant and minority communities revealed his deep racism and xenophobia. These beliefs were distilled in his stories “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He,” both written in New York. David J. Goodwin will discuss his new book Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, a biography on the horror master’s love-hate relationship with the city, and he will invite the audience to discover how Greenwich Village informed Lovecraft’s imagination and fiction.  

David J. Goodwin is the Assistant Director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and a past Frederick Lewis Allen Room scholar at the New York Public Library. 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, Sapientia, and Urban Archive.