On the evening of 15 March the Providence Evening Bulletin ran an obituary, full of errors large and small; but it made mention of the ‘clinical notes’ Lovecraft kept of his condition while in the hospital— notes that ‘ended only when he could no longer hold a pencil’. This feature was picked up by the wire services, and a brief obituary appeared in the New York Times on 16 March. Frank Long, Lovecraft's best friend, learnt of his death from reading this obituary.

A funeral service was held on 18 March at the chapel of Horace B. Knowles's Sons at 187 Benefit Street. Only a small number of friends and relatives were there—Annie, Harry Brobst and his wife, and Annie's friend Edna Lewis. These individuals then attended the actual burial at Swan Point Cemetery, where they were joined by Edward H. Cole and his wife and Ethel Phillips Morrish, Lovecraft's second cousin. The Eddys had planned to come but arrived after the gravesite ceremony was over. Lovecraft's name was inscribed only on the central shaft of the Phillips plot, below those of his father and mother: ‘their son / HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT / 1890– 1937’. It took forty years for Lovecraft and his mother to receive separate headstones.

The outpouring of grief from both the weird fiction and the amateur press was instantaneous and overwhelming. The June 1937 issue of Weird Tales contained only the first wave of letters from colleagues and fans alike. It is remarkable how perfect strangers such as Robert Leonard Russell, who knew Lovecraft only from his work, could write: ‘I feel, as will many other readers of Weird Tales, that I have lost a real friend.’ Many real friends—from Hazel Heald to Robert Bloch to Kenneth Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith to Henry Kuttner—also wrote moving letters. Jacques Bergier, in the September 1937 issue, concluded: ‘The passing of Lovecraft seems to me to mark an end of an epoch in the history of American imaginative fiction.’