The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a short novel by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1927 and not published in his lifetime. An abridged version appeared in Weird Tales in 1941, and the complete text was published in an Arkham House collection in 1943.

The story is set in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1928. Charles Dexter Ward is a history-minded young man from a family that has been prominent in the town for generations, and his curiosity leads him to an ancestor, Joseph Curwen, who is remembered for alchemy and for worse. Ward resembles Curwen closely, and he begins to repeat the experiments he finds recorded, working towards things that a respectable young man of the period should not be attempting at all. By the time the novel proper begins, Ward has been confined in an asylum after a period of madness and then has disappeared from his cell, which is found thick with dust. The account of what happened is assembled by the family's physician, Marinus Bicknell Willett, as he works through papers, visits the places Ward went and meets what he cannot explain.

Lovecraft had the story typed but never saw it come out, and the Providence settings, the family history and the learned horror belong to the method he used throughout his fiction.