NOTE: Books available at the WATERBORO PUBLIC LIBRARY will appear in PLUM TELETYPE. Please note that the Waterboro Public Library does not have most of these books!
Born in Cantu, Italy, poet John Tagliabue moved to New Jersey when he was a child. He earned both a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University. After graduation he was the recipient of seven Fulbright Grants, which enabled him to travel, study and teach in Italy, Japan, China, and Indonesia. He has also taught in Spain and Brazil. In 1953 he and his family returned to the United States when he accepted a teaching position at Bates College. He taught at the Lewiston, Maine college until his retirement in 1989. He and his wife, Grace, moved from Maine to Providence, RI, in 1998. Tagliabue died on 31 May 2006. (Another obituary, with good biographical material, here.) Bates College established the John Tagliabue Poetry Prize to honor him after his death.
His poetry books include Poems (1959), A Japanese Journal: Poems (1966, 1969), The Buddha Uproar: Poems (1967, 1970), The Doorless Door (Japan Poems) (1970), The Great Day: Poems, 1962-1983 (1984), New and Selected Poems: 1942-1997 (1997).
Tagliabue apparently also wrote (unpublished) plays in the 1950s while living in Florence, Italy.
Tagliabue's poetry is included in anthologies such as Hierbas, Púrpura y Magnolias (1973); For Neruda, For Chile: An International Anthology (1975); and Poetspeak: In Their Work, About Their Work: A Selection (1983). Tagliabue's poems also appear in a Boston University art exhibit catalog, Marianna Pineda, Sculpture, 1949 to 1996.
Booth Tarkington, prolific novelist and playwright, wrote "cheerful, realistic novels about life in the Middle West," beginning with The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) and including two Pulitzer Prize winners. Born in Indianapolis on 29 July 1869, Tarkington traveled throughout Europe and North America, and eventually built an estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he and his second wife, Susannah Robinson, lived from May through December each year, returning to Indianapolis for the balance. Their amenities in Kennebunkport included, besides the house, a schooner Regina and 'The Floats,' a boathouse to which Tarkington went afternoons for coffee and conversation. Kenneth Roberts (q.v.) was a close neighbor and friend. The boathouse is now the Kennebunkport Maritime Museum/Gallery.
Tarkington had a middle-class upbringing in Indianapolis. He attended Purdue University and then Princeton University (class of 1893), graduating from neither. He was editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine at Princeton, which later awarded him both an honorary A.M. (1899) and an honorary Litt.D. (1918).
In 1893, Tarkington returned to Indianapolis and tried to make a living from drawing and writing. A period of rejections followed his sale of a sketch with text to Life magazine in 1895, but finally, in 1898, Tarkington's manuscript The Gentleman from Indiana was accepted for publication by New York publisher S.S. McClure and became a bestseller in 1900, launching a long and financially successful literary career. The 1921 Publishers Weekly poll of booksellers rated him the most significant contemporary American author, above Sinclair Lewis, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. His short story, 'Cider of Normandy,' won the 1931 O. Henry Memorial Award.
With his financial success, Tarkington developed into a collector of antique furniture and of paintings, particularly 17th- and 18th-century English portraits. He was a knowledgeable trustee of the John Herron Art Museum (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art) and used his knowledge of art to write Some Old Portraits (1939). He carried on an extensive correspondence with his favorite art dealers, the Silberman brothers in New York, who became the basis for his stories collected in Rumbin Galleries (1937).
Tarkington felt that it was the duty of good citizens to run for public office, so, in 1902, Tarkington ran for and won a seat as a Republican in the Indiana State House of Representatives; this position provided background for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. Especially in later life, Tarkington became very conservative in politics, violently opposed to FDR and the New Deal.
Tarkington married twice. His first marriage, in 1902 to Laurel Louise Fletcher, ended in divorce in 1911, and his daughter by that marriage, also named Laurel, died young. In 1912, he married Susanah Kiefer Robinson of Dayton, who survived him by twenty years. He saw a good deal of his nephews, Donald, John, and Booth Jameson, the sons of his sister Haute (Mrs. Ovid Butler Jameson), and of their children. His letters to his nephews are collected in Your Amiable Uncle; Letters to His Nephews by Booth Tarkington (1949; illus. with his original sketches).
Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), which won the Pulitzer Prize the year it was published and which was listed as #100 in the Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels, was made into a play, Pampered Youth in 1927; the play was later released as Two to One. Orson Welles produced, directed, and scripted the well-known movie version of The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, which is extensively described online. The book has been described as 'a] social commentary [that] charts the rise and fall of three generations of the successful and socially connected Amberson family in the face of a changing America. The spinning wheels of industry and commerce quickly overtake the old world and change the definition of ambition, success and loyalty almost overnight -- and irreversibly change the definition of the Amberson family as well.'
His 1922 Pulitzer Prize winner, Alice Adams (1921), describes the 'humourously ridiculous life of a fading aristocratic family trying to get back on top of the social ladder.' It was also adapted as a play, in 1945 by Elizabeth Trotter.
Tarkington's works include:
Tarkington also wrote the introduction for George C. Tyler's Whatever Goes Up: The Hazardous Fortunes of a Natural Born Gambler (1934; with J. C. Furnas), the memoirs of Tyler, theatrical manager and Broadway figure. Tarkington's stories and other works appear in many collections and anthologies.
There are Tarkington papers at The Indiana Historical Society and at Princeton University; the Indiana Historical Society website includes biographical sketches of Tarkington. There are numerous books written about Tarkington, including My Amiable Uncle: Recollections About Booth Tarkington (1983), by his grand niece Susanah Mayberry; On Plays, Playwrights, and Playgoers: Selections From the Letters of Booth Tarkington to George C. Tyler and John Peter Toohey, 1918-1925 (1959; ed. Alan S. Downer); and Booth Tarkington, A Sketch, by Asa Don Dickinson (1928). Biographical material on the web is available through The Indiana Historical Society Manuscripts and Archives Dept. as well as from Princeton University; the Princeton sketch is focused on Tarkington's time there. The 4 Sept. 1939 Life magazine carried an article on Tarkington: 'Booth Tarkington -- Dean of Professional American Fiction is Still Going Strong at 70.'
For a bibliography of Tarkington's works, try Dorothy R. Russo and Thelma L. Sullivan's A Bibliography of Booth Tarkington 1869-1946 (1949; 303 pp.), published by the Indiana Historical Society.
His story 'Mrs. Protheroe: The Conversion of the Senator from Stackpole' (1905) is available online. Harper's offers facsimile and PDF-formatted texts of some Tarkington novels and stories.
Tarkington died on 19 May 1946. Visit his gravesite via FindAGrave.
Linda Tatelbaum, born in Rochester, New York, on 28 Feb. 1947, now lives in Burkettville (Appleton), Maine, with her husband Kal Winer in a solar-powered house. Her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. are all from Cornell University. Before moving to Maine, she lived in New Hampshire and Appalachia. She came to Maine in 1977 and is associate professor of English at Colby College in Waterville.
Tatelbaum founded About Time Press in 1996 to publish her first book, Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader's History (1997), which has been widely reviewed and acclaimed; Yes! magazine offers an interesting and extensive review. Writer on the Rocks: Moving the Impossible (1999) combines writing and actual rock-moving as its twinned themes. Her novel, Yes and No, was published in 2003.
For more on Tatelbaum, including excerpts from her books, more reviews, and NPR interviews, visit her Web site at Colby College. You can read more about her gardening venture (with her husband), which they call Gardening Mutual, in 'Letter from Appleton', a 3-page PDF file with photos. More biographical info in an essay titled 'My Not-So-Simple Resume' at Utne Reader, excerpted from Carrying Water as a Way of Life.
Historian Alan Taylor is a Portland native (born 17 June 1955) who lived in Buxton and Windham and graduated from Colby College in 1977. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Among his fellowships are the National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at The College of William and Mary plus fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library.
Taylor, University of California Davis history professor since 1994, received Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Beveridge prizes for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995), which explores the lives of Judge William Cooper and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who were father and son. His 1990 book Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 is included in the Mirror of Maine. In 2001 he published American Colonies, which is the first of five volumes in The Penguin History of the United States. The book received the gold medal for nonfiction in the 71st California Book Awards.
Of special note is the annual UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement that was awarded to Taylor in 2002. The $30,000 prize is said to be the largest award of its type in the United States. At the award ceremony Taylor announced he was giving $20,000 of the prize money to the Roland Marchand Memorial Fund, which provides support to graduate students in American history at UC Davis. The fund is named in memory of Marchand who taught 33 years at UC Davis.
Taylor is claimed by Maine because he's married to Sarah Spencer [Bean], who lives in Brunswick; he divides his time between Brunswick and northern Virginia, where he's co-director of the creative writing program at American University. Taylor, who was born on 21 June 1942 in rural Loudon County, Virginia, received his B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1965 and his Masters in creative writing from Hollins College (Va.), where he studied under the poet William Jay Smith. Before he came to American University, he taught at Roanoke College (Salem, VA) and the Univ. of Utah.
Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1986 for his third book The Flying Change (1986). Other books of poetry include The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), which were republished in one volume in 1992; Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996 (1997); Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews (1999/2000; clerihews are small poetic biographies); Crooked Run (2006). Taylor has also published a poetry textbook, a book of essays, and a translation of Euripides' Children of Herakles. He translates poetry from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian and Russian.
Blackbird offers an interview with Taylor (2002). The Cortland Review interviewed him in 1999 (with photo). There was an article about Taylor in the March 1999 'Maine In Print,' which is published by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and another in the July/August 2000 issue, which mentioned that was currently working on a book of poetry drawn from experiences in Maine.
Robert Taylor, born in Abilene, Texas, on 22 July 1940, lived in Blue Hill, Maine, from 1986 to 2003 with his partner, Ted Nowick, a sculptor. In 2003, they moved to Oberlin, OH, to live; Taylor is an Affiliate Scholar at Oberlin College there. He graduated with honors from Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech Univ.) in 1962 with a degree in journalism. While in college, he was a ROTC member, and on graduation was commissioned as an Army second lieutenant, assigned to the Pentagon from 1963-1966 and served in Vietnam at Army Headquarters in 1967, receiving a Bronze Star that same year. He was released from active duty when he returned stateside and lived in Washington, D.C. for a while.
He has been the editor of Transportation U.S.A., assistant editor of Music Educators Journal, and deputy editor of America Illustrated, a now-defunct Russian-language magazine distributed in Russia.
His novels are:
Taylor reads from his works at libraries and bookstores around the country and speaks on issues of peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Pierre Monteux Memorial Foundation, in Hancock, Maine, which sponsors a six-week school for conductors and orchestra musicians each summer. More info at Taylor's website. There's a talk Taylor gave in Oberlin in spring 2005, called 'A Vietnam Veteran Looks at Iraq,' which was published in the Summer/Fall 2005 issue of The Puckerbrush Review and which is online.
Maria Testa is a Rhode Island native, now living in Portland, Maine. She also lived in Dublin, Ireland, for a bit. She studied sociology at Brown University and specialised in family law at Yale University Law School, graduating in 1989.
Most of her books are of special interest to pre-teen boys, with male protagonists and gritty issues like homelessness and parents in prison at their core. In 2002, she started a trilogy of books that explore her father's life.
Candlewick Press offers a short bio of Testa.
Testa's books include:
Thayer, her husband Bill, and her daughter-in-law Sheila run an organic farm, Darthia Farm, in Gouldsboro, Maine. Thayer, born in New York City on 11 March 1944 and raised in Nova Scotia, is a spinner and a weaver as well as a writer. She has a B.A. in British Literature from Bridgewater State College (MA), graduating magna cum laude, and has taught English and theatre in public high school in Massachusetts, and adult education and writing workshops in Maine. Her website has more info about her.
Her novels, all set in Maine, are Strong for Potatoes (1998), about a girl of Native American (Passamoquoddy) descent growing up in Eastern Maine; it won the Rep's Choice Award and was chosen by Barnes and Noble for their Discover program. Thayer's short story 'Listen to the Corn' was nominated by the Antigonish Review for the McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize; A Certain Slant of Light (2000); and A Brief Lunacy (2005), which starts in rustic Maine, where a retired surgeon and his wife enjoy a comfy seacoast retirement, painting and cooking and drinking wine, etc., but when a lost camper arrives, the scene darkens and psychological truths are explored.
You can hear an extensive audio interview (recorded 1998) with Thayer through Ann On-Line, containing both biographical info and discussion of her work.
Virginia (Dinnie) Thorndike lives in Morrill, Maine, with her husband, Phil Roberts, Jr. She has a B.A. from Boston University (1967). Press notes mention that her great-grandfather was a three- time America's Cup defender and that her grandfather designed sailing yachts and was also an America's Cup contender. Her website provides more information about her and her books.
She's published seven books: The Arctic Schooner Bowdoin: A Biography (1995); Windjammer Watching on the Coast of Maine: A Guide to the Famous Windjammer Fleet and 34 Other Traditional Sailing Vessels (1993/2002, with photos by Thorndike); How We Got There From Here: Remembering the Days of Steamers, Trolleys, and Model Ts in Maine (1997); Maine Lobsterboats: Builders and Lobstermen Speak of Their Craft (1998); On Tugboats: Stories of Work and Life Aboard (2004); Islanders: Real Life on the Maine Islands (2005); and LNG: A Level-Headed Look at the Liquefied Natural Gas Controversy (2007). Her article 'Isaac H. Evans and the Plank' is online.
Tincker, born in Ellsworth on 18 July 1833, was a novelist of considerable popularity following the Civil War. She was already teaching in the public schools when she was 13, and by the time she was 15, her first work was published. She was a volunteer war nurse during the Civil War, serving in Washington, D.C. After this, she lived in Boston, Mass., and in Italy. Tincker was raised Protestant but became Catholic (during a time when Catholics were actively persecuted for their beliefs, under the influence of Knownothingism), and many of her novels reflect her Catholic viewpoint.
She wrote short stories for The Catholic World, which serialised her novel The House of Yorke (1872) in 1871-72; this novel dramatized the actual tarring and feathering of a Catholic pastor by local bigots in Maine. Other works by Tincker include A Winged Word; And Other Sketches and Stories (1873); Grapes and Thorns (1874/1909); Six Sunny Months (1877); Signor Monaldini's Niece (part of "No Names" series; 1879); By the Tiber (1881); The Jewel in the Lotos: A Novel (1884; illus. Thomas and Helen Hovenden); Aurora: A Novel (1886); The Two Coronets (1889); San Salvador (1892/1978), in which a Utopian community in Spain is portrayed; and Autumn Leaves: Verse & Story (1898). Many of her books reflect the beauty of Italy, where she lived between 1873 and 1887.
The online Catholic Encyclopedia has an entry on Tincker, from which most of the above information was taken. Her poem 'A Legend,' published in May 1873 in Atlantic Monthly, is available in facsimile through the Making of America project, as is her 8-page story 'From the Garden of a Friend' (October 1886). Her work was included in the 10 volumes of stories titled Stories by American Authors (1884) -- part of a 30-volume set of Short Stories, published 1898-1899 by Charles Scribner's Sons; also included were stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford (q.v.), Lucretia P. Hale, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Celia Thaxter, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Nathaniel P. Willis (q.v.), Edward Bellamy, C.A. Stephens (q.v), and many others. (The American Authors volumes were published in 1904 by the Success Co. as Library of American Fiction.) Tincker is also included as a Maine woman active in the Civil War in A Vast Army of Women: Maine's Uncounted Forces in the American Civil War (by Lynda L. Sudlow (q.v.), 2000), along with Dorothea Dix, Caroline Dana Howe, Sarah Milliken-Sprague, Harriet Scamman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (q.v.). Tincker died on 4 December 1907 in Boston.
Jeanne Titherington (born 23 May 1951), who grew up in Maine, lived in Rockland and spends summers in Maine, has lived since 1994 in Houston, Texas. She has a daughter and a son. Titherington writes and illustrates children's picture books. She studied art at Pratt Institute and graduated from Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art).
Her books include:
She's also illustrated a 1992 edition of Saki's The story-Teller: Thirteen Tales, Jack Prelutsky's It's Snowing! It's Snowing! (1984), Judith Gorog's A Taste for Quiet and Other Disquieting Tales (1982), and a 1981 edition of Andrew Lang's The Chronicles of Pantouflia.
Lew Turco (also uses pseudonym of Wesli Court) -- prolific and internationally known poet, essayist, and literary critic -- is a long-time summer resident of Dresden, Maine, and since 1996 has lived there year-round, operating an online used book store called Mathom Bookshop until it closed in Dec. 2006; the name was taken from a JRR Tolkien word meaning 'useless treasures,' things for which there is no earthly use but that we still can't bring ourselves to throw away. He's got a detailed essay on his weblog titled 'How I Got Into Books.'
Turco was born on 2 May 1934 in Buffalo, NY, served in the U.S. Navy from 1952 to 1956, and graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1959, whose alumni association honored him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1992. He earned his M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1962, which has a collection of some of Turco's papers. He is Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY in Oswego, NY, where he founded the Program in Writing Arts; he was also founding director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Turco has won many awards, including the 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, the 1990 Cooper House Chapbook Prize from Poet magazine, the first annual Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize (with Italian translator Joseph Alessia) in 1997 for his A Book of Fears, the 1999 John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry, and an honorary degree in Humane Letters from Ashland University in Ohio in 2000. He was also inducted into the Meriden, Connecticut, Hall of Fame in 1993. Much more about Turco at his website and his weblog 'About Me' page. He's also listed at Wikipedia.
Works written under his own name include:
The following books were published under the pseudonym Wesli Court:
Turco also edited That Band from Indiana, written by Charlie Davis (Mathom Pub. Co., 1982).
Turco's 1998 poem 'Blues for George Gershwin,' is available online through The Blue Moon Review. His terzanelle 'Terzanelle in Thunderweather' (scroll down to second poem) is also online, and his pantoum 'The Eunuch Cat' (scroll down 2/3 of the page).
Philip Turner was raised on a dairy and potato farm in Mapleton. He received his bachelors degree from the University of Maine in 1948 (started with the class of 1944), and after earning a doctorate in soil science and business administration from Michigan State University and working for Dupont Corp., he returned to Maine in 1960 to manage the Aroostook Federation of Farmers in Caribou. He is well-known for his historical novel I Am General Eaton, whose subject first interested Turner during a title search to his property in Caribou, which is on a portion of the original Eaton Land Grant. After the book was published, the Turners embarked on a 5-month tour of Navy and Marine bases along the East Coast, at which both the author and his book were well-received.
Turner's books include:
Thomas Urquhart (husband of children's book writer Amy MacDonald) is a principal in Urquhart & Spritz, a consulting firm on business and the environment based in Maine. From 1988-2000, he was executive director of the Maine Audubon Society, and he has worked for BirdLife International in Cambridge, England, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and the National Audubon Society. He earned a degree in geography from Oxford University. His book, For the Beauty of the Earth: Birding, Opera and Other Journeys, was published in June 2004 and chosen as one of the best non-fiction books of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times (link is in PDF).
Van de Wetering has been a motorcycle gang member in South Africa, a Zen disciple in Japan, and a volunteer police cop in Amsterdam. He was born in Rotterdam, raised in Amsterdam, and has lived in the places listed above as well as Colombia, Peru, and Australia, but since 1975 he's settled in a post-and-beam home (with several outbuildings) on 65 acres on the Union River in Surry, Maine, with his wife Juanita, an artist. He attended Delft University (1948), the College for Service Abroad (1949-51), Cambridge University (1951), and the University of London (1957-58). For more about Van de Wetering, this site offers a detailed biography, bibliography (including books in print), and photos, and an interesting short article on Van de Wetering's "Zen detectives" from Eye.Net. He was interviewed on the NPR program "Fresh Air" in Jan. 1997. Van de Wetering was featured on the Maine Public TV program "Good Reads" in July 2000 and that site provides biographical material, a works list, excerpts, and his favourite books list.
Although he didn't start publishing until he was in his 40s, Van de Wetering has written over 35 books, including crime novels featuring two Dutch detectives, children's books, and non-fiction.
Van de Wetering's crime novels and collections include:
His children's books include Little Owl (1978; about Buddhism), Hugh Pine (1980; Hugh Pine is a porcupine), Hugh Pine and the Good Place (1986), and Hugh Pine and Something Else (1989).
Auto/Biographical works include The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery (1973), A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community (1975; 1999), Afterzen: Experiences of a Zen Student Out of His Ear (1999/2001), and Robert van Gulik: His Life, His Work (1988), a biography of the Dutch diplomat, orientalist, and novelist.
Born in Portland, Maine, Van Dusen grew up in central Massachusetts. He returned to Maine in 1985, now living with his wife and two sons in Camden. He studied painting and illustration at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, graduating in 1982 with a BFA, after which he was an art director and cartoon editor of a magazine for teenagers. He's done illustration work for L.L. Bean, Maine Healthy Beaches Program, and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, among others, and was profiled in the May 2003 issue of DownEast Magazine. He's written and illustrated three children's books, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee (2000), A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee (2003), and If I Built a Car (2005). Van Dusesn's website offers more info on him and his books.
Voigt, a resident of Deer Isle since the early 1990s, was born in Boston, raised in Connecticut, went to Dana Hall School, and is a 1963 Smith College graduate. She was a high school English teacher in Glen Burnie and Annapolis, Maryland and continued teaching during the early years of her writing career. For more on Voigt, check the Random House Voigt biography. Some of the links below also offer a plethora of biographical information on Voigt.
Voigt's first book, Homecoming (link is to a detailed Teacher's Guide) was published in 1981. The idea for the book came to her when she saw several children waiting by themselves in a car. Although she was working on a novel that would later be published as Building Blocks (1984), she put it aside and began writing Homecoming, the story of the abandoned Tillerman children. When it was published, she received immediate favorable recognition from reviewers and quickly became and remains one of the most popular writers of young adult books. The Tillermans are also the focus of Dicey's Song (1982; teacher's guide to Dicey's Song), which won the 1983 Newbery Award, Sons From Afar (1987), and Seventeen Against the Dealer (1989).
Minor characters in the Tillerman series are the central characters in A Solitary Blue (1993), a 1994 Newbery Honor Book, and Come a Stranger (1995).
Voigt addresses many of the issues and fears faced by today's adolescents. The concerns include:
In addition to her contemporary novels, Voigt has written several historical novels set in the middle ages. The Kingdom Series includes Jackaroo (1985), On Fortune's Wheel (1990), and The Wings of a Falcon (1993). Elske (1999) is also set in the time and location of the Kingdom.
Her versatile writing talent is also expressed in her mystery novels, The Vandemark Mummy (1991) and The Callender Papers (1983; 2000) which received the Edgar Award for the best juvenile mystery in the year it was published.
In 1995, Voigt received the Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. The award, named after a noted Young Adult Services librarian, is given in recognition of a writer's collective work rather than a single book. She was the 2004 recipient of the Maine Library Association Youth Services Section's Katahdin Award for lifetime achievement in children's literature.
Other Voigt titles are: Tell Me If The Lovers Are Losers (1982); Stories About Rosie (1986); Shore Writers' Sampler II: Stories And Poems (1988); Glass Mountain: A Novel (1991); David and Jonathan (1992); The Rosie Stories (2003; ill. Cat Bowman Smith), a chapter book written from the dog's point of view; Good Moring, Rosie (2003). Her novel with a Maine setting, Tree By Leaf, was published in 1988. A young children's book, Angus and Sadie (2005) is about two border collie puppies adopted by a Maine farm couple.
Although only one book, Presenting Cynthia, (1995) has been published about Voigt, there are numerous websites focusing on her books. The sites range from the thoughtful comments about Voigt's writing of an eighth grader from Cross River, New York, to the scholarly views on Voigt's Jackaroo of a Virginia Tech philosophy professor.
And, as some of her books have been translated into German, there are even German web pages, such as this description of Jackaroo.
Lea Wait, who lives in Edgecomb, is the author of children's historical novels (for kids ages 8-12), and a new mystery series for adults starring antique print dealer Maggie Summer. She is also an antique prints dealer herself. Wait grew up in suburban New Jersey (summering in Maine), was a drama and English major at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA, attended grad school at New York University, studying American civilization, and worked in corporate public relations. In her 20s and single, she adopted four girls from Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong and India (all now grown), and she founded a support group for single adoptive parents; she is still on the board of the National Council for Single Adoptive Parents. Wait's website has more information about her and her books.
Her books for children and young adults are:
Wait's website provides teachers' guides and Q&A on her children's books.
Her mystery series books -- featuring Maggie Summer, professor of history at Somerset County Community College and owner of Shadows Antiques, an antique prints shop -- are:
She's also published a non-fiction book about writing, co-written with Lesley Bolton, titled The Only Writing Series You'll Ever Need: Writing Children's Books (2007).
Poet David Walker was born in the village of Head Tide in Alna, Maine and is a Bowdoin College graduate. He also studied at New College, Oxford, where he received a B. Litt. degree in 1967. For four years he taught at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Before his current teaching at University of Southern Maine, he taught at Holy Cross and Bowdoin. His poetry books include Moving Out (1976), Two Poets: David Walker, Jeffrey Holman (1975), and Voiceprints: David Walker (1989). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review and The Maine Reader: The Down East Experience, 1614 to the Present.
Author and illustrator Sandy Walling was born in Red Bank, NJ, and moved to Maine in 1971 with her husband John. They now live in Yarmouth, Maine. A 1999 graduate of University of Southern Maine, Walling worked in the printing industry for most of her life, including for Maine Medical Center, managing its printing/mail and copy facilities; and for newspapers, printers, an advertising agency, and as marketing production manager for Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers. She has been a board member of the Maine Graphic Arts Association. After retiring in 2002, she returned to school to study computer graphics.
Walling has published two children's books. A Day at the Beach: A Seaside Counting Book From One to Ten (2003), born of her frustrating experiences as a child with dyslexia; the book helps children learn that there is a correlation between numbers, words and objects. Her second book is ABC's at the Zoo! (2004). Both books are published by Yarmouth-based Abernathy Publishing House, which Walling founded in 2003.
George S. Wasson, noted maritime painter and writer, was born in Groveland, Massachusetts. His father's family, however, was from the Penobscot Bay area. As a child, George spent most of his summers with his grandfather, "Squire" David Wasson in Brooksville. When he was seventeen, his father, Rev. David Atwood Wasson, took George to Stuttgart, Germany. He soon enrolled in the Art Academy, where he studied for three years.
After his return to Massachusetts, he spent the summers sailing along the New England coast, sketching scenes he would later paint in his Boston studio. In 1889 he and his wife and their two sons moved to a new home in Kittery Point, Maine. He remained there, painting and writing, until 1916 when he and his wife and their son David's widow, moved to Bangor. His short stories, many of which were first published in literary magazines, grew out of his great respect and friendship for his Kittery Point neighbors and his delight in their colorful expressions. In fact, his writing is still praised for the authenticity of the coastal vernacular expressions.
Wasson's three collections of short stories are:
After two of his history articles, "The Vanished Pinky" and "The Old Rockland, Maine, Lime Trade," were printed in Old-Time New England magazine, Wasson was encouraged to write a book-length maritime history. In 1932, his Sailing Days on the Penobscot; The River and Bay as They Were in the Old Days was published. Lincoln Colcord contributed a detailed list of vessels constructed on the Penobscot River and Bay. The book, minus Colcord's detailed tables, was republished in 1949.
Debra Waterhouse, M.P.H., R.D., is a Portland native who now lives in San Francisco. She's written several books about women and weight:
A March 2001 chat interview with Waterhouse is available online, and more background on Waterhouse and her books through her publishing website.
Waterman was born in South Hope, Maine, and now lives in South Thomaston. His articles and book are about his experiences as a diver and photographer. Just a Sailor: A Navy Diver's Story of Photography, Salvage, and Combat (2000) is an autobiographical account of Waterman's 13 years in the Navy (Diver First Class), some of which he spent in Vietnam. He's now a writer, photographer, and seasonal commercial lobsterman, and Waterman's Web site notes that he's also available for "off-the-wall ventures and expeditions where most are not crazy enough to go." His resume, some stories, and lots of photos are posted on his Web site.
Waterman has had stories published in Soldier of Fortune, Yankee magazine, Down East, National Fisherman, Working Waterfront, and Island News. His story on saving whales was bought by Yankee in 1994 but not published; you can read it and see the accompanying photos on-line. Another story on salvaging a lake amphibian [plane] was published by Down East (1995) and also appears online. Waterman has also published photographs.
Born in Mt. Vernon NY but a Brooklin resident for some years (and a summer resident in childhood of Belgrade, Maine), "Andy" White wrote for many years for The New Yorker magazine. He is also known as the author of the children's classics Charlotte's Web (1952; chapter one of Charlotte's Web), which was set in Brooklin and at the Blue Hill Fair, and Stuart Little (1945; made into a feature movie in 1999; chapter one of Stuart Little), which together won the 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). White also wrote a book of essays on Maine life, One Man's Meat (1942), from columns originally written for Harper's magazine.
Additional works include:
White and his wife Katharine also edited A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941).
The library has a copy of the chidren's book E. B. White: Some Writer, by Beverly Ghermac (1992) and for adults, Onward & Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White, by Linda H. Davis (1989). For more information on White, the New York Times provides a wonderful Life & Times section on White, which includes links to, among others, a Sept. 1977 article entitled "Appreciating E.B. White," and an Aug. 1997 New York Times' adapatation of Roger Angell's introduction to a recent edition of One Man's Meat; Angell is White's stepson and in this article he calls One Man's Meat the making of White as a writer. The Kuusankoski Public Library (Finland) also provides a White biography. Some biographical information on Katharine (1892-1977) -- whose garden in Brooklin was the focus of her book of essays, Onward and Upward in the Garden and of a collection of correspondence between White and Elizabeth Lawrence in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters -- is also available online.
Maine's Friend Library (Brooklin) holds a collection of his works and Katharine's. E.B. White (Robert L. Root, Jr.; Univ. of Iowa Press) is a 1999 book about White's development as an essayist.
Born in Philadelphia, Wiggin was raised there and in Portland and Hollis, Maine, and she lived in Hollis for years, although she died in Harrow, England. She attended the Gorham Female Seminary, the Morison Academy (Baltimore), and the Abbott Academy (Andover, Mass.). In 1873 she moved with her family to Santa Barbara, Calif., where eventually Wiggin directed a private kindergarten. Wiggin and her sister Nora Archibald Smith together established the California Kindergarten Training School. Wiggin herself was head of the Silver Street Kindergarten until she married lawyer Samuel B. Wiggin in 1881. They moved to New York City in 1884. After her husband died in 1889, Wiggin moved back to Hollis, where she wrote the children's book Timothy's Quest (1890; made into a silent movie and shown locally now at the Saco River Grange Hall in Hollis) and the adult novel The Village Watch-Tower (1895). She travelled widely and remarried in 1895 to George C. Riggs, a New York businessman.
Wiggin is best known for her children's books, such as The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887/1889), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903; later a motion picture), and The New Chronicles of Rebecca (1907). Her other works include:
In 1925, her sister Nora published a book about Wiggin called As Her Sister Knew Her. Wiggin finished her autobiography, My Garden of Memory, in 1923 and it was published after she died. Bowdoin College awarded her an honorary degree in 1904 and provides an online collection guide to Wiggin's personal papers.
J. Russell (Russ) Wiggins, a voracious reader, was born in Luverne, Minnesota, in 1903 and died in Brooklin, Maine, in 2000. He was managing editor and then chief editor of The Washington Post from 1947 until 1968. He was named by President Lyndon B. Johnson as ambassador to the United Nations in 1968, serving until Nixon's inauguration in 1969. He and his family moved permanently to Brooklin, Maine (his previous summer residence), in 1969, where he published the weekly Ellsworth American, which he had bought in 1966; he sold it in 1989 but remained editor until his death. He never attended college but had ten honorary degrees and was said to read a book a day. He served in the Army Air Force during World War II, as an intelligence officer in Washington, North Africa and Italy. He was married for 67 years, and had four children (three of whom pre-deceased him).
Wiggins wrote satirical poetry, which was published weekly in the Ellsworth American along with a nature photograph; the newspaper published four collections of his poems [I can find only three listed] under the titles Down East Poems and Pictures: From the Ellsworth American 1984-1991 (published in 1993) and Down East Pictures and Poems (published 1976 and 1978). Wiggins published Freedom or Secrecy in 1956 (revised in 1964), 'a book in which he argued that the news media have a right to access to the news as well as a right to publish it.' He also 'prepared' the Handbook of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch, July, 1945: A Guide to Policy and Style (1945), and he co-authored Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts (1967), with Archibald Cox and Mark DeWolfe Howe, papers originally presented in 1965-1966 as a series of evening lectures at the Massachusetts Historical Society. He wrote the introduction for Morning Was Starlight: My Maine Boyhood by Ernest Dodge (1980).
The Washington Post has an extensive and detailed obituary of Wiggins. Robert Estabrook, in the Spring 2001 issue of The Masthead, offers a tribute to his friend and mentor, James Russell Wiggins, Journalistic Legend. His papers are at the Folger Library at the University of Maine. Wiggins is buried in Sedgwick, Maine.
Wight was born and raised in Charlton, Massachusetts. She graduated from Shepherd Hill Regional High School in 1981, and then attended Becker Junior College in Leicester, Mass., to earn an associate degree in Travel and Tourism. She and her husband, David, moved to Poland Spring, Maine, in 1991 and are the owners of Poland Spring Campground on Lower Range Pond.
Wight's first picture book for children, The Three Grumpies, was published in September 2003. Illustrated by Ross Collins of Scotland, it's listed in both the USA and the UK.
More information on Wight is available on her website and through her publisher, Bloomsbury USA.
Christopher Willard, born in Bangor, Maine, is a writer, visual artist, and instructor who lives now in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He lived in New York for 15 years and taught at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York City for 10. He received his B.F.A. from the Portland School of Art (Maine) and his M.F.A. from Hunter College. His art appears in collections worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has published over 50 articles in art magazines, journals, and books, and had a monthly column in American Artist. More on Willard on his weblog.
His novel Garbage Head is described as "a daring postmodern novel written almost entirely in sentence-length paragraphs which examines the promiscuity of telecommunication devices and the vicarious thrills of celebrity culture." It was mentioned on National Public Radio's feature "Read Any Good Books?" in Nov. 2005 and was reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books. Willard has been awarded an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Literary Grant to aid in writing his next novel, tentatively titled The Fiction Writer. He's also published a non-fiction book, Watercolor Mixing: The 12-Hue Method (2000). His short essay titled "Postmodern Preordination" is available online, as is his discourse on color education.
A native Mississippian (born Macon, MS) who spent his childhood in Ohio, Williams graduated from Dartmouth in 1910, worked as a reporter for the Boston American from 1910-1916, and went on to live outside of Boston, summering in North Searsmont and Blue Hill and to write over 35 novels and 400 short stories, many set in the mythical village of Fraternity, Maine (similar to his home in the Searsmont area), as well as some histories and other non-fiction works. His wife, Florence Trafton Talpey of York, Maine, was descended from a long line of sea captains. Williams received honorary degrees in American literature from Dartmouth College and Colby College.
Works include:
Williams also edited A Diary from Dixie (1949; written by Mary Boykin Chesnut) and wrote the introduction to The Kenneth Roberts Reader (1945).
The Mississippi Writers and Musicians Project of Starkville High School in Mississippi has a webpage about Williams, with a list of works, a biography, a short timeline, and a number of links for more info on Williams.
Joanne S. Williamson was born in Arlington, Virginia. She was a student at Barnard College from 1942-1944 and then attended the Diller Quaile School of Music from 1944-1946. Before moving to Kennebunkport in 1956, she was employed as a writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines in New York City and Connecticut.
In 1956, her first first novel, The Jacobin's Daughter, was published. Set in the time of the French Revolution, it was the first of Williamson's eight young adult historical novels. It was succeeded by The Eagles Have Flown (1957), set in Rome around the death of Julius Caesar; Hittite Warrior (1960 and 1990); The Glorious Conspiracy (1961), set in the American Constitutional era; The Iron Charm (1964), set in the time of Emperor Justinian and King Arthur; And Forever Free (1966), set during the U.S. Civil War; To Dream Upon a Crown (1967), concerning Henry VI of England; and God King (2002).
In addition to her writing, Williamson also taught piano from 1956 until her retirement in 1990.
William Willis was a Portland lawyer who is considered the most important nineteenth-century Portland historian. His two volume The History of Portland (1831, 1833) was republished in 1865 and issued in a facsimile edition in 1972. In 1849 he edited the Journals of the Rev. Thomas Smith and the Rev. Samuel Deane. Smith and Deane were the pastors of the First Parish Church in Portland. Their journals record their experiences from 1726-1814 and provide an invaluable view of 18th-century social and political life. The book is included in The Mirror of Maine: One Hundred Distinguished Books That Reveal the History of the State and the Life of Its People. Willis also edited the first six volumes of Collections of the Maine Historical Society (1831-1859). In 1873 he published A History of the Laws, the Courts, and the Lawyers of Maine.
Willis's political career included a term as state senator in 1855 and he served as Portland's mayor in 1857.
Bowdoin College, which granted him an honorary degree in 1867, has a small collection of his correspondence, drafts of his writing and estate information.
Born in Portland and an 1827 graduate of Yale, Willis founded the American Monthly magazine in Boston, but he spent most of his adult life in New York, eventually as editor of the New York Mirror, where in 1844 he hired Edgar Allan Poe; this is where Poe wrote "The Raven." While working for the Mirror, Willis spent time in Paris, Italy, and England, and he wrote of the scenes and people he encountered in Pencillings by the Way (1835) and Loiterings of Travel (1840), as well as in a book of collected articles under a pen name (Phillip Slingsby) titled Inklings of Adventure (1840). During the Civil War, Willis was a Washington, D.C. correspondent for Home Journal magazine. Besides his journalistic works, Willis wrote two plays, Bianca Visconti (1837) and Tortesa, the Usurer (1839) and a book of poems, The Sacred Poems (1843).
Willis's sister, Sara Payson Willis Parton, became known as a writer under the pen name of "Fanny Fern." His father, also Nathaniel Willis, edited the Eastern Argus and was the first Maine newspaper editor imprisoned for using the press to express his beliefs.
More biographical information on Willis and an excerpt from "The Inner Chamber" is provided on line by W. Leigh Branson.
Dorothy Clarke Wilson was born in Gardiner. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bates College in 1925, she married fellow student Elwin L. Wilson in August of that year. After his seminary training at Princeton Theological Seminary and Boston University School of Theology, Dorothy and Elwin returned to the state of Maine where he served Methodist churches and the Maine Methodist Conference as a District Superintendent. The Wilson Center at the University of Maine, which Rev. Elwin served from 1950-1955 when it was called the Maine Christian Association, was named in honor of the Wilsons.
In 1928, Wilson began her writing life when she sold a play she had written for the church she and Elwin were serving in Scarborough. Many of her books had Biblical themes or were focused on the lives of missionaries. He best known book, Prince of Egypt (1949), won the Westminster prize for the best religious book the year it was published and was also one of the sources for the film 'The Ten Commandments.' Despite the Academy Award it won, Wilson did not like the film and has been reported to have used the word 'flimflammery' to describe the scene in which Moses parted the Red Sea. She is also well known for her biographies about women such as Dorothea Dix and Elizabeth Blackwell as well as presidents' wives Dolly Madison and Martha Washington.
Among the many honors Wilson received were honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from Bates in 1948 and the University of Maine in 1984. The University also honored her with it 1988 Maryann Harman Award. Westbrook College presented her with its 1989 Deborah Morton Award. Her work for peace and justice was recognized when she received the New England United Methodist Award for Excellence in Social Justice Ministry in 1975. In 1988 the American Association of University Women also honored her for her justice work. Both Orono High School and the University of Maine offer the Dorothy Clarke Wilson Peace Awards.
In addition to her many plays, essays, and lectures, Wilson's work includes:
Hazel Wilson was born in Portland. She lived on Munjoy Hill, just a few streets away from the Portland Observatory and attended Portland schools.
The Hill, as it is known in Portland, is the location of The Surprise of Their Lives, published in 1957. Wilson graduated from Bates College in 1919 and the following year earned a Master of Library Science from Simmons College. She returned to Portland where she was employed as the librarian at Portland High School from 1920 to 1923. Later, she was a librarian at the Northeast Missouri Teachers College (1923-1926), the American Library in Paris (1926-1928), and at Bradford Academy (1928-1929), and was supervisor of Denver school libraries in 1929 and 1930. Although her library career ended when she married, Wilson's knowledge of children and books helped her create characters and plots that make her books appealing to both child and adult readers. She was also a book reviewer for publications in the Washington, D.C., area and was a lecturer at George Washington University from 1956 to 1967. She died in Bethesda, Maryland.
Wilson's first book, The Red Dory was published in 1939, with a new edition released in 1959. Like many of her books, it was set in Maine. Other books with Maine locations are The Owen Boys (1947), Island Summer (1949), Thad Owen (1950), Tall Ships (1950), and His Indian Brother (1955), as well as the previously mentioned The Surprise of Their Lives (1957).
Her son Jerry's childhood experiences were the inspiration for Wilson's "Herbert" series, which include Herbert (1950), Herbert Again (1951), More Fun With Herbert (1954), Herbert's Homework (1960), Herbert's Space Trip (1965), and Herbert's Stilts (1972). Two other books influenced by her son's adventures are Jerry's Charge Account (1960) and The Three and Many Wishes of Jason Reid (1988).
Wilson also published non-fiction works such as The Story of Lafayette (1952), The Story of Mad Anthony Wayne (1953), The Little Marquise: Madame Lafayette (1957), The Seine, River of Paris (1962), Last Queen of Hawaii: Liliuokalani (1963), and The Years Between: Washington at Home at Mount Vernon, 1783-1789 (1969).
Bates College awarded Wilson an honorary Master of Arts in 1956. She earned The Ohioana Award for Island Summer, the Boys Club of America Junior Book Award for Thad Owen, and the Edison Award for His Indian Brother.
Robley Wilson, born in Brunswick, Maine, is a short story writer, novelist, and poet, and was long-time editor (1968-2000) of The North American Review; he also taught in the English department at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls) from l963 until 2000. He graduated from Bowdoin College with honors in English in 1957 (receiving an honorary degree from same in 1987) and earned an MFA with distinction from the University of Iowa in 1968. He's married to fiction writer Susan Hubbard, English professor at the University of Central Florida (Orlando) and author of two short story collections, Blue Money (1999) and Walking on Ice (1990).
Wilson is the author of several short story collections:
His stories have also appeared in anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize III, Best American Short Stories of l979, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Fiction of the Eighties: A decade of stories from TriQuarterly, and The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the Eighties. He contributed to Time and Chance: An Iowa Murder Mystery (1998), a serial novel by 17 Iowa writers. Three short stories -- "Flaggers," "Fathers," and "Barber" -- are available online.
Wilson's poetry collections include
Several of Wilson's poems are available online, including
Wilson has also edited some fiction anthologies, including Three Stances of Modern Fiction: A Critical Anthology (1972; with his former Bowdoin College professor and friend Stephen Minot); Four-Minute Fictions: Fifty Stories from the North American Review (1987), with very short stories by Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Barry Lopez, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Stephen Dixon, Pamela Painter, W. P. Kinsella, Doris Read, Diane Vreuls, etc; and 100% Pure Florida Fiction : An Anthology (2000; with his wife, Susan Hubbard).
An extensive Sept. 1990 interview with Wilson is online.
Wood, a Blue Hill resident, began her history teaching career at the Gorham Normal School (now the University of Southern Maine) in 1930. She continued at the institution, with its myriad name changes, until her retirement in 1972. She is a graduate of Blue Hill's George Stevens Academy in 1922, Colby College in 1926, and Radcliffe College in 1929.
In retirement Wood published four books, all of which focused on the social history of the Blue Hill region. The titles are Country Fare: Reminiscences and Recipes from a Maine Childhood (1976); Saltwater Seasons: Recollections of a Country Woman (1980); Hannah: Reminiscences of an 1850 Childhood (1982); Deep Roots: A Maine Legacy (1990). Miss Wood was also a regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor and the Ellsworth American.
Her dedication to teaching history has been recognized in a number of ways. George Stevens Academy has a lecture room named in her honor and the University of Southern Maine has Wood Hall. She was the recipient of the Blue Hill Chamber of Commerce "Woman of the Year" award and has also been honored by the Maine School Superintendent's Association. In addition, she received an honorary doctorate from Colby College. In 1994, Miss Wood was inducted into the Maine Womens Hall of Fame. Her portrait and a brief biographical sketch can be found on the award's site.
Miss Wood's ongoing commitment to education is evidenced by her donation of scholarship money. In 2000 she established a $100,000 scholarship in memory of Edna Frances Dickey, a colleague and friend. The scholarship is awarded to qualifying students at the Lewiston Auburn Campus of the University of Southern Maine.
Monica Wood, born in Mexico, Maine, is a long-time Portland resident. A guidance counselor at Westbrook High School for eight years, she began her writing career as a short story writer in her late 20s. Her stories have been included in a number of anthologies, including Pushcart Prize Anthology 1999 and Best American Short Stories 1997. She includes a selective list of anthologies and magazines in which her stories appear on her web page. In addition to the listed anthologies, another short story, "Disappearing," is included in a text used by New York University medical school.
Wood's fiction includes novels Secret Language (1993/2002), My Only Story (2000), and Any Bitter Thing (2005). A collection of short stories called Ernie's Ark -- set in fictional Abbott Falls, Maine, about a man who decides to build an ark in his backyard -- was published in 2002.
In addition to writing fiction, Wood also presents workshops in which she teaches beginning writers how to improve their short stories and novels. Description (1995), a writer's guide, is an outgrowth of the workshops. She has published three anthologies/teachers' guides whose purpose is to promote the inclusion of contemporary fiction in the junior high and high school curriculum. Titles include Short Takes (1992), 12 Multicultural Novels (1997), and The Best of S. E. Hinton (1999). Wood's web page contains brief descriptions of her books. Portland educational publisher J. Weston Walch published the teachers' guides. Wood also published The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing (2002).
Wood (copy of daguerreotype portrait located on Maine Public Broadcasting site) is considered Maine's first woman novelist and America's first gothic novelist. She was born in York. Until she was 19, she, her parents and her siblings lived with her grandfather, Judge Jonathan Sayward, one of the most affluent men in Maine. At 19, she married Richard Keating, a law clerk in her grandfather's office. When he died five years later (1783), she had two young daughters and was pregnant with a third child, a son.
Wood's first novel, Julia and the Illuminated Baron, A Novel: Founded on Recent Facts, Which Have Transpired in the Course of the Late Revolution of Moral Principles in France was published in 1800. It is a melodrama set in France and focuses on the activities of the Free Society of the Illuminati. Dorval: or, The Speculator: a Novel, Founded on Recent Facts (1801) was published next. A fictional account of the real 1796 Yazoo frauds, it tells the story of the schemer Dorval's role in the Georgia land speculation that involved bribes to state legislators. With Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue: An Old Man's Story (1802) and Ferdinand and Elmira: A Russian Story (1804), she returned to European settings for her romantic melodramas.
In 1804, Mrs. Keating married her second husband, General Abiel Wood, and moved to Wiscasset. After he died in 1811, Sally, now Madame Wood, went to live in Portland. Her fifth and last book, Tales of the Night, (1827/1982 facsimile reprint) contains two stories -- "Storms and Sunshine, or the House on the Hill" and "The Hermitage, or Rise of Fortune" -- set in Maine and New Hampshire.
Wood, desiring anonymity, wrote and published under pseudonyms. On the title pages of her first four books, she is identified as either "A Lady" or "A Lady from Massachusetts." Since Tales of the Night was published after Maine became a state in 1820, she is identified as "A Lady from Maine" on its title page.
The Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England and the Special Collections Department of the University of Maine's Fogler Library have first edition copies of Madame Wood's books and other Wood-related artifacts.
Colin Woodard is a Maine native (grew up in Strong) living in Portland (ME), a journalist who specializes in global affairs -- regularly writing for The Christian Science Monitor and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and a frequent contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- and author of three non-fiction books.
He graduated with a B.A. from Tufts University in 1991 and with an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded the 1997 Morton Kaplan prize for his thesis on the Balkans. He's travelled extensively, living in Budapest, Zagreb and Sarajevo for more than four years. He is a 2004 recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Public Advocacy, given by the Tides Foundation for his global reporting on environmental issues. Some of his magazine and newspaper articles are available online, including an article titled "Who Owns Maine's Media?", and many available in digital format through Amazon.com. More information on Woodard's website. An audio interview with Woodard from June 2004 is available from New Hampshire public radio's "The Exchange."
Woodard's books are Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (2000), narrative non-fiction about the deterioration of the world's oceans through pollution, harmful fishing practices, ignorance and global warming; The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (2004), a cultural and environmental history, as well as a look into the future, of coastal Maine; and The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (2007), a romantic story about Caribbean pirates as social revolutionaries during the 'Golden Age' of Piracy (1715-1725) and how their age ended at the hands of Bahamian governor Captain Woodes Rogers. He's also a contributor to Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change (2004), which consists of ten articles from the September/October 2000 issue of E/The Environmental Magazine.
Wormser is a poet, born in Baltimore, now living in Hallowell, Maine. He majored in English at Johns Hopkins University, received an MA in English from the University of California in 1970, moved to Maine in 1971 received his MLS from the University of Maine in 1973, worked as a librarian in Maine and taught at the University of Maine at Farmington. He won "Poetry" magazine's Frederick Bock Prize in 1982. In 2000, he was named Maine's second Poet Laureate, his term ending in 2005. Wormser is on the board of directors of the Robert Frost Place.
Wormser's books of poetry include The White Words (1983), Good Trembling (1985), Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems (1989), When (1997; won Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry 1996; three good reviews of When), Mulroney and Others: Poems (2000), and Subject Matter (2004). He's also co-authored with David Cappell two books for teaching poetry, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (1999) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (2004). His poem, "A Quiet Life," is online. In 2007, he published a collection of essays called The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid about 25 years of living in a house in Maine without electricity or running water.
Born and educated in New York, Yglesias lives in Brooklin, Maine, and New York City. Her second husband, from whom she was divorced in 1992 after 42 years of marriage, was the writer Jose Yglesias. Although Helen Yglesias always thought of herself as a writer, she did not start writing full time until she was 54. Prior to that, family responsibilities required her to earn money in other ways. During her five years (1965 to 1969) as the literary editor of The Nation, she became convinced she had the ability to write as well as, if not better than, many of the authors whose work she reviewed. She subsequently resigned her position and became a full time writer. A long autobiographical essay written in 1981 by Yglesias is available through The New York Times (free registration required to access it). There's also a good deal of background on Yglesias and her books through Barnes and Noble.
Yglesias's first novel, How She Died (dealing with cancer) was published in 1972. Her other novels are Family Feeling (1976; portrait of adult children of Jewish immigrants), Sweetsir (1981; protagonist is a battered wife, based on true story of a New England woman), The Saviors (1987, concerns idealism as an aging radical looks back over her life), and The Girls (1999). Maine Books Online offers a review of The Girls; Amazon offers 12 reviews of The Girls). She also authored three non-fiction titles. Starting Early, Anew, Over, and Late (1978) contains a chapter titled "Autobiographical Fragment" in which she describes her decision to become a full time writer. Her other two non-fiction titles, Isabel Bishop (1989) and Semblant (1996) focus on the art world. Only 25 copies of Semblant, to which Yglesias contributed an essay on the German painter Paula Moderdohn-Becker, were produced by the Gehenna Press, Rockport, Maine.
Yglesias has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Arts and visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a contributor to The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review. Like Jennie, the main character in The Girls, Yglesias is also a frequent reviewer for Wellesley College's Women's Review of Books.
Born in Bailleul, Belgium, of a Belgian mother (who died soon after childbirth) and a French father, Marguerite Yourcenar (nee de Crayencour) was a poet, historian, world traveller, translator, essayist, and critic. She studied at Yale University in the 1930s and came to Mount Desert Island's Northeast Harbor in the mid-1940s; she had been visiting the U.S. when the Nazis invaded France and she stayed in the U.S. becoming a citizen in 1947 (later, her French citizenship was restored). Her home on MDI was called Petite Plaisance, and she lived there with her friend, lover, and translator Grace Frick for 40 years. Yourcenar also taught for a decade at Sarah Lawrence College, as professor of comparative literature from 1940-50.
Yourcenar's most famous book is a historical novel called Les Memoires d'Hadrien (1951; excerpt from Memoirs of Hadrian), which became a world-wide bestseller. Her first published work was financed when she was 16 by her non-conformist father, who was her tutor and confidant; it was Jardin des chimeres, a poem in dialogue form based on the myth of Icarus. Her pen name was chosen then, an anagram of her surname. Yourcenar's novels' central figures are often men torn between duty and passion, with a focus on key moments in history.
An incomplete list of her other works includes:
