H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) spent most of his life in Providence and set many of his stories here, giving the city a persistent literary afterlife in horror fiction. His last residence was at 66 College Street, a modest Victorian house he rented from 1933 until his death in 1937 — the house that appears, renamed and darkened, in his story "The Haunter of the Dark." His grave is at Swan Point Cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, where his headstone reads "I Am Providence."
The John Hay Library at Brown University holds Lovecraft's letters and manuscripts. A bookshop specializing in weird fiction called Weird Providence operates on Wickenden Street. For visitors interested in his work, the atmospheric parts of College Hill that appear in his fiction still look roughly as they did when he walked them.