By “provincial gothic,” I mean the use of gothic conventions to anatomize the pathology of regional culture. Although the phrase is uncommon, most readers will immediately and rightly associate it with such works as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town poems, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and the “southern gothic” tradition exemplified by the fiction of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. The student who wishes to understand New England's place in American literary history as a whole will have a special interest in such writing, since New Englanders produced the first sizable body of it in this country and since provincial gothic constitutes America's most distinctive contribution to the gothic tradition as a whole.