The book offers detailed information on locations frequented by Lovecraft in his correspondence and stories.

Such specific locations include St. John's churchyard, where Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft both visited.

Lovecraft and his friends Adolphe de Castro and Robert H. Barlow composed acrostics in memoriam to Poe while visiting the churchyard.

As an early study of Lovecraft geography, the book's influence precedes its publication, with Beckwith being acknowledged by L. Sprague de Camp for his assistance in de Camp's 1976 Lovecraft: A Biography, and continues to this day in Faye Ringel's 2017 chapter on Early American Gothic in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction.The book is cited in the work of most scholars in the field, such as S.T.

A revised and expanded edition was published by Grant in 1986 and again in 1990 for Lovecraft's centennial.