This novella was inspired by a journey to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which in 1931 was much faded from its glory years as a shipbuilding, fishing, and trading center.

At the time, Lovecraft was trying to find his way forward as a literary man. The rejections he’d been hit with earlier in the year had convinced him that what he was doing was not going to take him to where he wanted to be — that his efforts to serve two masters had doomed him to rejection by both, and that a repudiation of the pulp market and a thoroughgoing purification and possibly transformation of his literary style was the only solution. 

Accordingly, he spent November and December of 1931 preparing experimental drafts of this story in different styles. He rejected each in turn; none survives today. Eventually Lovecraft gave up and wrote the story in his regular style.