Last night's talk at Cornerstone in Salem went well—thanks to everyone who came out. Lots of good questions and ideas to add to my "updates for the next edition" list.
Tonight I'll be at the
Andover Bookstore at 7 pm. I'm brushing up on my dates and timeline for Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Elizabeth Stuart Phelpses, all of whom lived within walking distance of where the bookshop is now.
And, there's also
a review in today's Gloucester Daily Times. It points out that I overlooked T. S. Eliot, who spent summers in Gloucester and wrote about it in his
Four Quartets. I've been meaning to write a post about Eliot and a few other "missed" authors here. He, like Sylvia Plath, spent time on the North Shore and included some landmarks in their work. (In
The Bell Jar, Esther swims out to Lynn's Egg Rock in one scene.)
I have no bulletproof logic for why someone like Lydia Pinkham—a patent medicine marketer—made it into the book and some of our country's most prominent poets didn't; just that I was looking for more of the lesser known, people who deserve to be rediscovered, people for whom buildings and streets are named but whose contributions are forgotten, and quite simply, stories that piqued my interest.
There's a lot that can be added to my literary trail, and the more I dig into the each of these authors and their towns the more little tidbits I uncover. If only books didn't have drop-dead printing dates!
First up is author and historian Richard Francis discussing his 2005 book, Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience
. Samuel Sewall's diary, which he kept for his own reasons and not with an eye to posterity, is one of the most well-rounded pictures we now have of life in Puritan New England and includes charming, light-hearted passages about his romantic courtships. But he is best known for his role as one of the nine judges during the witch trials of 1692, and was one of the only people to publicly apologize for his role in the hysteria. On his blog, Francis writes:
