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The Maine Islands
Dorothy Simpson
A gathering of the history and folklore of Maine's islands, written by someone who came by the subject honestly. Dorothy Simpson grew up on remote Criehaven, and her book moves island by island through the stories, legends, and hard human history of the Maine coast — settlement and shipwreck, isolation and community, the particular weather of island life. It is affectionate regional writing rather than academic history, and it has aged into a small classic of the Maine bookshelf. For anyone drawn to the coast, to island life, or to the way places accumulate their own mythology, it is a warm and knowledgeable guide.
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The author
Dorothy Simpson (born Aleda Dorothy Knowlton, 1905–1998) grew up on Criehaven Island off the Maine coast — the experience that underwrites everything she wrote. She later lived on Gay's Island near Friendship and Cushing with her longtime companion, the well-known Maine novelist Elizabeth Ogilvie, with whom her literary life was closely entwined. She is an insider to her subject in the deepest sense: island life was not her material but her origin.
The book
First published in 1960; this is the Blackberry Books (Nobleboro, Maine) reprint that has kept it available. It belongs to the mid-century tradition of Maine regional writing — part history, part folklore, part memory.
How it has aged
As beloved regional Americana. Its afterlife is telling: after Simpson's death, her niece drew on her unpublished Criehaven journals to publish The Island's True Child (2003), so the personal world behind this book has itself become a small literature.
For more context
Elizabeth Ogilvie's Tide trilogy of Maine island novels; and Simpson's posthumously mined memoir The Island's True Child.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Dorothy Simpson
- Publisher
- Blackberry
- Place of publication
- Nobleboro, Maine
- Edition
- Reprint (orig. 1960)
- ISBN
- 0-942396-51-0
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places