Journal of a Cruise Made to the Paciific Ocean in the United States Frigate Essex in the Years Eighteen Twelve, Eighteen Thirteen and Eighteen Fourte

Porter,David

Parnassus Book Service

"When I got up from the Keelers' breakfast table there was something choking me besides the herrin' and golden seal, and it was not homesickness, either."Nineteen-year-old Sarah, fresh out of school and not knowing what to do with her life, chooses to journey to a land she knows to be a "remote, poverty-stricken place" containing "no society, no church, no library, not even a little country store." That place was the 19th-century village of Kedarville on Cape Cod where she was to be the local schoolteacher. Cape Cod Folks is a thinly disguised memoir of her year teaching in the rural Cape and of her encounters with the Keeler Family, Becky Weir, and especially her romance with the handsome and talented Lute Cradlebow. The memoir was so thinly disguised that McLean included the original names of all of the Cape Cod folk in the story. A year after its publication they sued McLean and her publisher for libel, pointing out that, despite what McLean had written, the main character had not been "the gawky lover of Sarah Pratt McLean" and no one in the village died during her stay. Despite the controversy, the novel was a success that inspired both a stage play and a Hollywood film. It provides an unforgettable picture of life on Cape Cod before the arrival of the twentieth century.Sarah Pratt McLean (1856-1935) taught at the Cedarville School in Plymouth for a year in the late 1870s. She continued writing stories full of local color for the next thirty-two years, producing fourteen books set in New England and the American West.

Cape Cod Folks

Literature & Fiction

McLean, Sarah Pratt

Genre Fiction

"A man may stand there and put all America behind him." 
Wishing to get a better view of the ocean, Thoreau made three walking trips across the Cape beaches between October of 1849 July of 1855. Sometimes he walked alone, other times he travelled with his friend William E. Channing. He met local fishermen, wreckers, lighthouse keepers and other native Cape Codders. He watched ships wrecked by storms, stayed a night at the Highland Light, and engaged a Wellfleet oysterman in a long conversation about daily life amid the sands of Cape Cod. 
He related stories of these encounters, as well as of the shipwrecks and the natural history of the Cape, in a series of lectures around New England. His sister Sophia, aided by his friend Channing, edited and published them as Cape Cod after his death. These tales of the Cape are balanced between the uncontrollable energy of the Atlantic Ocean and the fragile beauty of the landscape. 
Anyone who, like Thoreau, believes Cape Cod to be "a place of wonders" and who secretly believes (or wants to believe) that the Cape is best visited during "a storm in the fall or winter" will find here the Cape when it was "wholly unknown to the fashionable world".

Cape Cod (Cape Cod Classics)

Science & Math

Thoreau, Henry David`

Nature & Ecology

Life is full of adventure for little Anne Nelson who lives in a fishing village at the tip of Cape Cod in the days before the American Revolution. There are the wolves in the forest and the British man-of-war Somerset is in the bay. Worst of all, her father is lost at sea and the other children in Province Town say he is a British Spy. Then she gets the chance to help the rebels as the Revolution begins.

A Little Maid of Province Town (Cape Cod Classics)

Children's Books

Curtis, Alice Turner

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