Which U.S. region did Lovecraft spend most of his life in?

Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England.

He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890 and returned there permanently after a short period in New York City. Although his two years in New York influenced his writing and personal life, Providence remained his principal home and the center of his identity.

New England also became the dominant landscape of his fiction. He transformed real regional features—old villages, coastal towns, Puritan history, decaying houses, and isolated countryside—into the fictional settings of Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport.

The regional answer does not mean every story takes place there. Lovecraft also wrote about dreams, Antarctica, distant planets, and cosmic realms. “At the Mountains of Madness,” for example, is set largely in Antarctica, but New England was both his lifelong geographical anchor and his most characteristic literary setting.