Louise Dickinson Rich

Louise Dickinson Rich (born June 14, 1903 in Huntington , Massachusetts , † April 19, 1991 in Mattapoisett , Massachusetts) was an American writer .

Life

Rich's typewriter and bookcase in the summer home at Forest Lodge (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places ), 2011

Rich grew up in Bridgewater , Massachusetts, where her father edited the weekly newspaper The Independent . She graduated from Massachusetts State Teacher's College in 1924 with a bachelor's degree . Their first marriage in 1926 ended in divorce in 1931. While on a canoe trip with a friend in the state of Maine , she met her future husband, Ralph Eugene Rich. He had returned to the country from business life in Chicago .

Louise and Rich married a year later, and they settled on the Maine- New Hampshire state line near Umbagog Lake . They lived in a large summer house in Forest Lodge on the Rapid River , which, however, was poorly insulated and moved to a smaller house in winter. In her first work, the autobiographical We Took to the Woods from 1942, Rich depicts life in the wilderness with a husband, son and daughter and an assistant in a situation reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau .

After Rich's husband died unexpectedly in 1945, the author moved with the children to her hometown of Bridgetown. In the more than thirty years that followed, she wrote a number of autobiographical works, books on nature and history, and six novels. She died of heart failure in her daughter's home at the age of 87.

Publications

• We Took to the Woods . JB Lippincott Company, Philadelphia / New York 1942.
  • German: Geliebte Wälder: A piece of unknown America . A. Müller, Rüschlikon, Zurich, Switzerland 1947.
• Happy Land , autobiography. 1946.
• Start of the Trail: the Story of a Young Maine Guide , Roman. 1949.
• Innocence Under the Elms , 1955.
• The Coast of Maine , 1956.
• The First Book of New England , pictures by Leonard Everett Fisher. F. Watts, New York City 1957.
• The Peninsula , 1958.
• Mindy , 1959.
  • Mindy , children's book. Boje Verlag, Stuttgart 1963, ISBN 3-414-12440-8 .
• The Kennebec River , 1967.
• King Philip's War : The New England Indians Fight the Colonists , 1972.
• Summer at High Kingdom , novel. 1975.

literature

• Alice Arlen : She Took to the Woods: A Biography and Selected Writings of Louise Dickinson Rich . Down East Books, Camden, Maine 2000, ISBN 0-892724838 .

Web links

• New York Times obituary (en.)