Literary Providence

Roger Williams Founding Site

282 N. Main St

We might as well start from the beginning at the spring where Roger Williams (1603?-1683) founded Providence in 1636. The spring is dry, but Providence remains. Williams was a minister who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony after he was threatened with deportation for his heterodox views on the rights of Native Americans and the roles of church and state. He wrote extensively, and his "A Key into the Language of America" was the first study of Native American language to be published in English. He left notes written in a cipher that a team of Brown University students cracked only in 2012.

Providence Athenaeum

251 Benefit Street

The Providence Athenaeum is one of the oldest lending libraries in the country. In continuous operation since 1836, the library is home to important collections of works on natural history and travel, and it hosts a full schedule of readings, salons, and lectures. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) visited the Athenaeum while in Providence for a reading and inscribed his name on a copy of his anonymously published poem "Ulalume." He also took time to court the poet Sarah Helen Whitman with whom he had begun a correspondence in New York. They met here and at her family's home; He proposed marriage, but she rejected him, supposedly after hearing of a drinking spree in Providence.

Ultima Thule

1 Financial Plaza

Before Poe left Providence after Whitman's rejection, persons unknown dragged Edgar Allan Poe into the daguerreotype studio of Samuel Masury, where an assistant took the famous Ultima Thule portrait of the author in 1848. The image captures Poe at an especially unsettled time in his life. In the previous week he had attempted suicide in Boston and traveled to Providence to become engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman only to see their relationship dissolve within hours under pressure from her family.

22 East Manning Street

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), feminist, author, lecturer, fitness buff, and generally remarkable human being lived in this home with her mother before Gilman's marriage to painter Charles Walter Stetson. Gilman is best known for her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the utopian novel "Herland," but her memoirs, "The Livings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," describe best her peripatetic childhood and early adulthood in New England and Providence. Gilman's parents were separated, and her mother moved the family more than nineteen times during Gilman's childhood. Gilman's unsettled childhood made her restless and bold from an early age, and as a young woman she defied Victorian norms by attending RISD, and a new gymnasium for women located on what is now Kennedy Plaza.

26 Humboldt Avenue

After Charlotte Perkins Gilman's marriage to Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, the couple rented rooms in this house. Things did not go well; Gilman resented the inevitable limitations that marriage placed on her independence and writing, and after the birth of a daughter, she suffered a nervous breakdown that served as the inspiration for her best known work "The Yellow Wallpaper." In 1888 she left Providence with her daughter and moved to California, returning to the city infrequently. She began to write for magazines and journals as a way to support herself before launching a career as a lecturer in which she traveled constantly, speaking to almost any group that would hear her.

88 Benefit St

Benefit Street is one of the oldest streets in Providence, and it has grown from a crooked cow path to a busy, paved street. Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and essayist, lived in this house for many years with her mother and sister. She is best known as the woman whom Edgar Allan Poe courted and proposed to during a wild few months in 1848, but Whitman is an important literary figure in her own right. She published frequently in magazines and newspapers, and she was at the center of Providence's literary life in the mid-nineteenth century, befriending Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Trancendentalists, and mentoring young writers including George William Curtis and John Hay . Despite her rejection of Poe, she wrote "Edgar Poe and His Critics," an early defense of his reputation and talent.

Coliseum Club

272 Benefit Street

Whitman also was a member of the Coliseum Club, an informal group of literary-minded Providence residents, which included Rhoda and Charles Newcomb, Margaret Fuller, and Ann Power. It met at the house ofAlbert Gorton Greene (1802-1867), owner of what was at the time the largest private library in Providence and a key figure in the city's literary world in the mid-1800s. Greene was a lawyer and served for many years as clerk to the city's Municipal Court. As an author, he is best known for "Old Grimes" a poem that he composed while he was a student at Brown University. And in 1833-1834 he published and edited "The Literary Journal and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts," a monthly journal of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews.

Olney Street Baptist Church

100 Olney Ave

When Rudolph Fisher's (1897-1934) father, John Wesley Fisher, served as a pastor at the Olney Street Baptist Church, it was located farther down Olney Street near the intersection with Pratt Street, but the church moved to its present location when the entire neighborhood was cleared and redeveloped as part of Providence's urban renewal efforts in the 1960s. Rudolph Fisher was a brilliant polymath, a talented physician and a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance, as author of "City of Refuge" and "The Walls of Jericho," which both depicted life in Harlem. He attended Classical High School (captain of the debate team) and Brown; he died young at the age of 37.

65 Prospect Street

HP Lovecraft lived in the heart of College Hill in the house now located at 65 Prospect Street before his death, which is fitting for an author who is linked so closely to Providence and this neighborhood specifically. A terrific weirdo, Lovecraft (1890-1937) wrote supernatural tales, mostly for pulp magazines, that have at their heart a fascination with decay, decline, and hidden things. He filled them with impossible creatures like the Cthulhu and invented crumbling New England towns like Arkham. Lovecraft lived nearly all of his life around Benefit Street and College Hill, and the area, which was then in decline, became the settings for his stories. Noteworthy locations are this house which appears in "The Haunter of the Dark," the Halsey House described in the "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," and the Fleur de Lys Studio (7 Thomas Street), which appears in "The Call of Cthulhu." Lovecraft's reputation has revived recently, and Providence proudly claims the author as one of its own.