Description of the Town of Quebeck, A

   Essay (78,000 words); written September 1930–January 14, 1931. First published in HPL’s To Quebec and the Stars(1976), ed. L.Sprague de Camp.

   HPL’s single longest literary work—an exhaustive history of Quebec and a detailed travelogue of the city and neighboring regions, based upon his first ecstatic visit to the region in late summer of 1930. HPL relied largely on published histories and guidebooks for much of his historical account, but the travelogue section is manifestly based upon first-hand experience. The entire text is written in exquisite eighteenth-century English and reflects a British attitude in recording the defeat of the French by the English in the course of the eighteenth century. The text is filled with HPL’s drawings of typical Quebec architecture, and there is an appendix providing French and English names of prominent landmarks and the origins of placenames and street-names. HPL never prepared the text for publication, nor even a typescript to circulate among colleagues; hence it long remained unpublished. De Camp’s edition contains many mistranscriptions and also fails to correct several instances of HPL’s erroneous French.