“The Festival” Story By Lovecraft

"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It is considered to be one of the first of his Cthulhu Mythos stories. The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922. Lovecraft later called that visit the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence. In a flash all the past of New England--all the past of Old England--all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World--swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of all things in such a way as it never did before and never did again. That was the high tide of my life.( Jane 315)

The narrator's path through Kingsport corresponds to a route to the center of Marblehead; the house with the overhanging second story is probably based on Marblehead's 1 Mugford Street. The Congregational church in the story, though sometimes identified with St. Michael's Episcopal Church on Frog Lane, is more likely to have been inspired by one of two now-demolished Congregational churches; the Episcopal church lacks a steeple and is not on a hill. The tale's cemetery resembles Marblehead's Old Burial Hill.( Hennig 192)

The story is set at Christmas time: "It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind." An unnamed narrator is making his first visit to Kingsport, Massachusetts, an "ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten."( Walsh, 1999, ...