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Profiles of Maine
Lynn Franklin
Signed / inscribed
A 1976 gathering of Maine lives, set down by a freelance photographer and interviewer who spent the decade listening to the state's working people. Lynn Franklin sought out lobstermen and woods workers, guides and canoe builders, boatbuilders and rural schoolteachers, and rendered them in word and image — the kind of occupational lore and life history that usually vanishes unrecorded. It is a regional, documentary book rather than a literary one, but that is its value: an affectionate, unglamorized portrait of a vernacular Maine that was already passing when the shutter clicked.
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The author
Lynn Franklin was a freelance photographer and journalist based in Gorham, Maine, who between roughly 1972 and 1983 conducted a long series of interviews with Mainers — cultural stories, occupational lore, life histories. That fieldwork is now preserved in the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History at the University of Maine, which is the deeper context for this book. He belongs to the tradition of documentary listeners rather than trained folklorists — an outsider-insider who earned trust on the wharves and in the woods.
The book
Published by Maine Antique Digest of Waldoboro — a telling imprint, since M.A.D. was, and remains, the newspaper of record for the American antiques trade, lending the book a collector's eye for material culture. First edition, 1976, drawn from Franklin's interviews.
How it has aged
As primary-source Americana. Its people and trades are now largely historical, which turns a modest contemporary portrait into a small time capsule of late-twentieth-century working Maine.
For more context
The WPA life-history tradition (These Are Our Lives); the Salt oral-history project in Maine; and the broader literature of down-east vernacular life.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Lynn Franklin
- Publisher
- Maine Antique Digest
- Place of publication
- Waldoboro, Maine
- Year
- 1976
- Edition
- First edition
- ISBN
- 0-917312-00-7
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine
Places
Dad + Mom, from Bruce. Xmas '76