The MLHF organizing committee is discussing various issues to bring the Hall to reality.
There are no living writers in the Hall at present except for Philip Booth, who is very ill;
the nominating process for living writers will be set up by the committee.
Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood
| SSBKW, born in York, is considered Maine's first woman novelist and America's first gothic novelist. 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 a fictional account of the real 1796 Yazoo frauds, telling 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. |
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| In 1804, she married her second husband, General Abiel Wood, moving to Wiscasset. After he died in 1811, she, 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. Desiring anonymity, she 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. |
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Sarah Orne Jewett
| Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine, and lived most of her life there. She began as a short story writer for adults and young people, moving on to the novel. | |
| Jewett formed a close friendship with Annie Fields, wife of the publisher James T. Fields, and after Fields' death, she and Annie lived and traveled together. Fields and Jewett formed friendships with a number of artists and intellectuals of her time, including Rudyard Kipling, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. |
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| Jewett's best known works are the short story, "A White Heron," and The Country of the Pointed Firs, a novella. Her fiction presents intimate views of characters' lives, the growth and trials of friendships, with humor broad and subtle. | |
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The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project. |
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807-1882
Holman Day 1865-1935
Kenneth Roberts 1885-1957
Edna St. Vincent Millay
1892-1950
| Edna St. Vincent Millay was renowned for her traditional poetic and her bohemian living during her life. She infused the conventional forms of poetry with a fervent contemporary spirit. The publication in 1912 of her poem, "Renascence," won her acclaim. Early in her career, Millay wrote fiction under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. She later wrote several plays and an opera libretto. |
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Millay was awarded the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She published sonnets in the 1930's that earned her a lasting place among practitioners of the form. In later years, she applied her art to the Allied war effort and other social causes. Edmund Wilson deemed Millay "a spokesman for the human spirit". Few writers have commanded so wide and enduring an audience. From 1923 to her death, Millay lived with her husband in Austerlitz, New York, at a farmhouse at Steepletop, which is now a National Historic Landmark.
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| In 1973, Norma Millay, her sister, established The Millay Colony for the Arts to afford writers, composers, and visual artists the chance to further their work in surroundings already rich with an artistic heritage. | |
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Academy of American Poets Modern American Poetry |
Louise Bogan
1897-1970
| Louise Bogan was born August 11,1897, in Livermore Falls, Maine, and grew up in paper mill towns in Maine, NH and Mass. Her childhood was disturbed by her parents' differences, fueled by her mother's tirades and infidelities. She attended Boston Girls Latin School, went to Boston University for a year, married Curt Alexander in 1916, was widowed in 1919. She moved to New York City with her daughter and worked as a writer where she connected with the city's literary community, meeting William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson. She married writer Raymond Holden in 1925, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1937. Bogan wrote much of her poetry in the 1920's and 1930's. In the 1930s she began reviewing poetry for the New Yorker, a job she held for over 38 years. | ||
| Bogan was an intense and private poet, whose works reflected a sometimes tragic vision. She was reclusive, disliked talking about herself, and details of her private life are scarce. She was plagued by depression all her life and sometimes required hospitalization; her illness and pathologic jealousy ended her second marriage. Most of her poetry was written in the earlier half of her life when she published Body of This Death (1923) and Dark Summer (1929) and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She subsequently published volumes of her collected verse, and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, an overview of her poetry. She wrote usually in lyrical forms, maintaining an intense emotional pitch, and was preoccupied with exploring the disparity of heart and mind. She died in New York City. |
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Poetry Body of This Death (1923) |
Prose Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-50 (1951) Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955) What the Woman Lived, selected letters (1973) |
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Louise Dickinson Rich 1903-1991
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin 1892-1955
E. B. White 1899-1986
Ruth Moore 1903-1989
Bern Porter
 Bern Porter () is the "father of experimental Maine literature and artists," born in Porter Settlement, Maine, in 1911, graduating from Colby College, with an M.S. Brown University. He was a physicist on cathrode ray tube technology before WWII, drafted for uranium separation work on the Manhattan Project, a job he quit after the Hiroshima bombing. |
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| From 1944-1948 Porter and George Leite published the literary magazine "Circle 10." He also published Henry Miller's anti-war tract, "Murder the Murderers," being the first U.S. publisher of Miller. He actively promoted and published other writers under Bern Porter Books. Bern Porter developed his own art, including poetry, found poetry ("founds"), sound poetry, performance art, experimental essays, surrealistic photographs, collages, mail art, found sculpture and architectural sketches. Porter aworked as a physicist on NASA's Saturn V manned space project. Porter worked to integrate science and art, formally developed in his Sciart Mainfesto, and is the founder of the Institute for Advanced Thinking a network of non-academic scholars in various arts. |
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| James Schevill wrote 1992 Bern Porter biography - Where to Go, What to Do, When You are Bern Porter - a take-off on one of Porter's own titles. The book has a lengthy bibliography, numerous photos of Porter and and his work, with a fairly long description of Porter's writing and background. |
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with links to publishers and other websites, see Bern Porter |
Abbie Huston Evans 1882-1983
Marguerite Yourcenar 1903-1987
May Sarton 1912-1995
Philip Booth 1925-
Leo Connellan
1928-2001
| Leo Connellan, a Maine native, his subject matter rooted in the harsh reality of that Maine society. He is not the poet of the middle class, Chamber of Commerce or the literary academy. He is the "real Maine" poet of modern America. | |
 Photo by: Alan Chaniewski/Hartford Courant |
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| Connellan published 12 books, among them Death in Lobsterland and Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country. After life as a working person, Leo Connellan received long overdue recognition and became the Connecticut Poet Laureate and Poet-In-Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He also received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. |
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Constance Hunting
1924-2006 |
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Constance Hunting was a classical pianist, poet and an unselfish promoter of other writers. Hunting founded the Puckerbrush Press in 1971 and began publishing poetry and other work by aspiring young writers. Seven years later, she founded the Puckerbrush Review, a journal of poetry, essays, short fiction and reviews, often by writers from Maine. A native of Providence, R.I., and a graduate of Pembroke College, Hunting started out at the University of Maine as a part-time lecturer after her husband, Robert, was hired in 1969 as chairman of the English Department. She was chair of the National Poetry Foundation and edited books about May Sarton. She published 15 books of poetry including "Natural Things: Collected Poems 1969-1998", and a book of essays.
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