Tourist & Town - Maine Writers

Maine seems to inspire creativity. Throughout the years, many authors and poets have achieved national and, in some cases, international acclaim writing in or about Maine. Perhaps the most notable is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who is said to be the only American poet who was respected by the literary communities of England and Europe. Several contemporary authors have fans and readers worldwide.

Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952)
A summer resident of Vinalhaven as a child, Margaret Wise Brown moved to the island off the coast of Rockland in 1943. She was the author of beloved children’s books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny.

Tess Gerritsen (1953- )

photo by Paul D'Innocenzo.

Tess Gerritson

Tess Gerritsen is the author of medical thrillers such as Life Support, Bloodstream and The Bone Garden. She was born and raised in San Diego, received her B.A. in anthropology from Stanford University and her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii, along with her husband, also a physician. Now retired from medicine, she lives in Maine and writes full time. Her books have been on the New York Times best-seller list and been top sellers in the United Kingdom and in Germany.

Gail Gibbons (1944- )
Gail Gibbons is a prolific writer/illustrator of children’s nonfiction books. She has written dozens of books for young readers explaining how things work and exploring environmental subjects. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, she and her husband Kent Ancliffe now live most of the year on 300 acres in the small village of Corinth, Vermont, in a solar-powered house. Since 1986 they’ve spent several months of the year at a farmhouse on Matinicus Island in Maine.

Terry Goodkind (1948- )
A fantasy author who moved to Mount Desert Island in 1983, Terry Goodkind’s work includes the Sword of Truth series and The Wizard’s First Rule, a book that in 1994 yielded the most money of any fantasy novel in history.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Although Nathaniel Hawthorne can’t be claimed as a Maine native, he did live in the state while attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick in 1821-24, along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The home of his birth in Salem, Massachusetts, is now a museum. Among his most famous novels are The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
Sarah Orne Jewett was a life-long resident of South Berwick, where the Jewett House still stands in the center of the village. Her home became a gathering place for some of the most influential literary figures of the period. (The house is open to the public and can be toured from June through mid-October). Most famous in Maine for The Country of the Pointed Firs, she also wrote A Country Doctor, which was based on the life of her father, and numerous other short stories. She wrote her earliest pieces under the names Alice Eliott or A.C. Eliott. Many of her stories were first published in magazines including Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly.

photo by Paul D'Innocenzo.

Stephen King

Stephen King (1947- )
Perhaps Maine’s most famous current resident, Stephen King is the undisputed king of tales of horror and suspense. A graduate of the University of Maine in Orono, he had several short stories published before Doubleday released Carrie in 1974. Like many of his novels, Carrie was made into a successful film. Other best-sellers include The Stand, The Shining, Salem’s Lot and The Dead Zone. More then 300 million copies of books are in publication. King was born in Portland in 1947 and currently has homes in Center Lovell and Bangor; he and his wife Tabitha now spend the winter months in Florida.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Best known as America’s first professional poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland and graduated from Bowdoin College, where he later taught literature. He wrote about America – its landscape, its history and its people, including native Americans (Song of Hiawatha is among his best-loved poems).

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Many honors were bestowed upon him, including honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge universities, but he also endured great tragedy. His home in Portland is owned by the Maine Historical Society and is open for tours from May to December.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, spent much of her childhood in Camden. A graduate of Vassar College, she won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Harp Weaver and Other Poems in 1923. One of her most famous poems, Renascence, is said to have been inspired by the view from the top of Camden’s Mt. Battie. Although Millay rarely returned to Camden after college, she and her husband often summered on Ragged Island in Casco Bay.

Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957)
Kenneth Roberts was born in Kennebunk in 1938. After graduating from Cornell University in 1908, he served in World War I. Subsequently he was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post until he quit in 1928 to launch what became a successful career writing historical novels, essays and other nonfiction, most set in New England. In 1938, he built a home in Kennebunkport that he called Rocky Pastures. Roberts won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1957 for “his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history.” Among his best known works are Arundel, Northwest Passage and Rabble in Arms.

Richard Russo

Richard Russo (1949- )
Richard Russo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a former professor at Colby College in Waterville. Born in Johnstown, New York, and raised in nearby Gloversville, he now lives and writes in Camden. His novel Empire Falls, published in 2001, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He has written four other novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool and Straight Man, as well as a short story collection, The Whore’s Child.

May Sarton (1912-1995)
May Sarton was born Eleanor Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1916, settling in Massachusetts. Sarton lived in New Hampshire as an adult but moved to York in 1973 where she lived the rest of her life. She published 15 volumes of poetry, 19 novels, a dozen works of non-fiction – memoirs and essays, two children’s books and a lesser known but delightful book about the secret life of cats, entitled The Fur Person.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Best known for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a resident of Brunswick. The daughter of a preacher, she was a teacher as well as a poet and the author of travel books, biographical sketches and children’s books, as well as adult novels. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her first novel began as a serial for the anti-slavery publication, the National Era, and focused public attention on the issue of slavery. In writing the controversial book, Stowe drew on her personal experience as a former resident of Ohio, a slave state. Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe.

E.B. White (1899-1995)
A native of Mount Vernon, New York, E.B. White wrote essays, verse and other pieces for New Yorker magazine starting in 1929 and later wrote a popular column for Harper’s magazine entitled One Man’s Meat. He and his wife Katherine moved to a farm in North Brooklin in 1939. There he was inspired by a spider in his outhouse to write the classic children’s Charlotte’s Web. Other novels by E.B. White include Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. He also published books of poetry, collections of his essays and a little gem called The Elements of Style (in 1959), which remains the Bible of English usage and style for teachers and writers. White’s version was based on an earlier manual by William Strunk, Jr.; later the two collaborated on several revisions of the book.