Atiwaneto

Thomas Bailey-Aldrich

Mary Baker Eddy

Bill Bryson

Ken Burns

Willa Cather

E.E. Cummings

Carlton Fisk

Robert Frost

Horace Greeley

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Sarah Josepha Hale

Donald Hall

Nathaniel Hawthorne

John Hay

Ernest Hebert

John Irving

John Paul Jones

Ona Maria Judge

Jack Kerouac

Maxine Kumin

Bertha Lindsay

William Loeb

Christa McAuliffe

Grace Metalious

Tad Mosel

P.J. O'Rourke

Franklin Pierce

Marilla Ricker

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

May Sarton

Alan Shepard

Walter Theo Silver

Charles Simic

David Souter

General John Stark

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Henry David Thoreau

Earl Tupper

Steven Tyler

Mark Twain

Daniel Webster

John Wentworth

Thorton Wilder

Harriet E. Wilson

Atiwaneto

Atiwaneto spoke for the Abenaki in a conference with Captain Phineas Stevens, delegate from the Governor of Boston, in July 1752. Atiwaneto addressed the settlers as "Brothers," but staunchly defended the rights of the Abenaki and other tribes to retain possession of their own lands and the resources they held. Read Atiwaneto's statement on the website of Ne-Do-Ba, a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of Abenaki history and culture.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Mary Baker Eddy

The American Founder of the Christian Science Church was born in Bow in 1821. She suffered long periods of poor health in her early years. In her quest for a cure she visited Dr. Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine in 1862 and found that his non-medical principles cured her. She absorbed his system and became a disciple. In 1866 she said she was completely cured of injuries suffered in a fall by what she called "Christian science." She founded the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston in 1892. Learn more about her on the Mary Baker Eddy Library website.

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson was born on December 8, 1951, in Des Moines, Iowa. He received his B.A. from Drake University in 1977, after which he and his wife, Cynthia settled in England, where they remained until 1995. Bryson eventually became chief copy editor of the business section of The Times and then deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent. In 1995, Bryson returned to the U.S. with his family and lived in Hanover, New Hampshire for some years. In 2003, the Brysons and their four children returned to England, where he now serves as Chancellor at Durham University. Bryson is the author of a number of best-selling books including I'm a Stranger Here Myself and A Walk in the Woods. Learn more about Bryson and his work on his publisher's website.

Ken Burns

Willa Cather

Novelist Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia on December 7, 1873. Most often thought of as a chronicler of the pioneer American West, critics note that the themes of her work are intertwined with the universal story of the rise of civilizations in history, and the drama of the immigrant in a new world. Cather's fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place, the subtle presentation of human relationships, and a style of clarity and beauty. Cather came to Jaffrey, New Hampshire for the first time in 1917. While visiting her friends Isabelle and Jan Hambourg at the Shattuck Inn early that summer, Cather discovered a place that would become, as Edith Lewis notes, “the one she found best to work in.” Before her death in 1947, Cather requested that she be buried in the Old Burying Ground behind the Meeting House in Jaffrey. Her simple gravestone sits near a wooded area on the edge of the cemetery near clusters of rhododendron bushes. Read about Cather's visits to New Hampshire at the Willa Cather Archive.

E.E. Cummings

Cummings spent his summers at Joy Farm in Madison, New Hampshire.  His family bought the farm near Silver Lake from a farmer named Ephraim Joy in 1899.  In 1910 Cummings’ father built a summer home on the shore of Silver Lake and began leasing Joy Farm, but in 1929 Cummings’ mother deeded the farm to him, and he returned there every summer for the rest of his life. From his earliest years, Cummings had a deep love of nature, and the farm held a special place in his heart. As he once wrote to his mother, “I wouldn’t give an inch of New Hampshire for all the rest of New England.” He was at Joy Farm on September 2, 1962, when he suffered a stroke.  He died early the next morning at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire. He remains one of the most recognized and widely read American poets of the twentieth century. Joy Farm is on the National Register of Historic Places. Learn more about Cummings and his art in this article from Harvard Magazine.

Carlton Fisk

Carlton Fisk was born in Bellows Falls, VT, on December 26, 1947. But the Hall-of-Famer grew up in Charlestown, NH, where he graduated from Charlestown High School, then later attended the University of New Hampshire. At UNH, Fisk played baseball and was also a starter on the basketball team. He actually dreamed of playing for the Boston Celtics as a boy. But he was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 1967 instead.. He played in a record 2,226 games as catcher, more than any other in history. Fisk holds the record for the most home runs (72) hit after age 40. and he remains one of the top 500 Home Run hitters of all time. Fisk’s defining moment came in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series when he smacked a sinker toward the left-field foul pole at Fenway Park. Waving his hands enthusiastically as he made his way to first base, Fisk willed the ball toward fair territory, winning Game 6 against the Cincinnati Reds in the 12th inning, and forcing a Game 7. The Red Sox renamed the foul pole the "Fisk Pole," to honor Fisk's winning moment in a game that is considered one of the best baseball games ever played. Learn more about Fisk and his storied career on New Hampshire.com.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 but moved to New England at the age of eleven. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree. In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by British poets Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
Learn more about Frost and his life in New Hampshire on the website of the Frost Farm in Derry.
Learn about Frost's time in Franconia on the website of The Frost Place.

Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on 3rd February, 1811. He trained as a printer but later moved to New York where he became a journalist. Greeley worked for the New Yorker and in 1841 established the New York Tribune, a newspaper he was to edit for over 30 years. Greeley took a strong moral tone in his newspaper and campaigned against alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prostitution, capital punishment, and slavery. In 1872 the Liberal Republican Party nominated Greeley as their candidate and he stood against Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency. During the campaign Thomas Nast produced a series of cartoons attacking Greeley. He commented that the venom of these cartoons were so bad that he "scarcely knew whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary." Greeley, won 40% of the popular vote but died soon afterwards on 29th November, 1872. One friend claimed that he had been "crushed by the unmerciful ridicule Nast had heaped on him." Learn more about Greeley in this article on the Tulane University website.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in 1890 in Concord, New Hampshire into a radical, activist, working-class intellectual family. She gave her first public speech when she was 15, on "Women under Socialism." In 1920, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's concern for these basic civil liberties, especially for immigrants, led her to help found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). From 1927 to 1930 she chaired the International Labor Defense.

Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale was born on October 24, 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire to Revolutionary War Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell. Well educated in the classics, she continued her private studies after her marriage in 1813 to David Hale, a lawyer and Freemason. Sarah was widowed in 1822 with five children to support, four under the age of seven. After a brief stint with a millinery shop, she published her first book of poems, The Genius of Oblivion. Her career was firmly established with her first novel, Northwood, released in 1827. That same year, she began her most remembered literary position as editor of Ladies' Magazine from 1827-1836 and Godey's Lady's Book from 1837-1877. Hale continued to write poetry, novels, and children's literature, while serving as a major editorial force for the next 50 years. Hale resigned in 1877 and the magazine floundered until it folded in 1898. Hale died in 1879. Learn more about Hale and her pivotal role in the creation of the Thanksgiving holiday on this edition of NHPR's The Exchange.

Donald Hall

Donald Hall was named the 14th United States Poet Laureate in 2006. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at the age of 16 -- the same year he had his first book published. He is the author of more than 21 books of prose and 15 books of poetry. Among his many honors and awards are the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal and a Caldecott Medal for one of his children’s books. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, where he lives. Listen to an NPR interview with Hall and hear him read several of his poems.
Hall was featured in NHPR's Granite State Stories series. Hear his talk with Laura Knoy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

One of the great American authors of the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, MA, in 1904. Hawthorne is best known for his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne's other books include Twice-Told Tales (1837) and The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne was a close friend of President Franklin Pierce. When Pierce was elected President in 1852, Hawthorne was appointed to the important overseas post of American consul at Liverpool. He visited Celia Thaxter's home on the Isles of Shoals and kept a detailed journal of his experiences there. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864. He had set off for the New Hampshire hills with Franklin Pierce but died during the journey in Plymouth, NH. Learn more about Hawthorne in New Hampshire and read excerpts from his Isles of Shoals journal at SeacoastNH.com.

John Hay

Ernest Hebert

Ernest Hebert was born in Keene. He is the author of numerous novels, including his Darby series set in a fictional town in southwest NH. The Darby novels are The Dogs of March, A Little More Than Kin, The Passion of Estelle Jordan (the last two published together in The Kinship), Whisper My Name, Live Free or Die and Spoonwood. His other novels include Mad Boys and The Old American. The New England Booksellers Association named Hebert fiction author of the year in 2006. Spoonwood won the IPPY award for Best Regional Novel in the Northeast in 2005. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Learn more about Hebert and his work on his website.

John Irving

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire and studied and wrestled at Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended universities in America and Europe and published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, at the age of twenty-six. The World According to Garp was published in 1978 to phenomenal acclaim. Irving's novels include The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus, A Widow for One Year, The Fourth Hand and Until I Find You. Several of Irving’s novels have been made into films, and in 2000 he was awarded an Oscar for the screenplay for The Cider House Rules. He described the difficult, decade-long journey from page to screen in My Movie Business. He is also the author of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed and The Imaginary Girlfriend, memoirs of writing and wrestling. Learn more about Irving on the Academy of Achievement website.

John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones was born in a humble gardener's cottage in Scotland in 1747, went to sea as a youth, and was a merchant shipmaster by the age of twenty-one. Having taken up residence in Virginia, he volunteered early in the War of Independence to serve in his adopted country's infant navy and raised with his own hands the Continental ensign on board the flagship of the Navy's first fleet. He took the war to the enemy's homeland with daring raids along the British coast and the famous victory of the Bonhomme Richard over HMS Serapis. After the Bonhomme Richard began taking on water and fires broke out on board, the British commander asked Jones if he had struck his flag. Jones replied, "I have not yet begun to fight!" Jones visited New Hampshire twice. In 1777 he took Portsmouth-built Ranger with a Piscataqua crew to France. There he worried the British in a series of guerilla raids before his famous battle in the Bonhomme Richard. A hero decorated by the king of France, he later returned to Portsmouth to fit out the America, largest ship of war ever built in the nation to that day. Jones stayed at the Purcell House, today the John Paul Jones Museum. Learn more about Jones in New Hampshire in J. Dennis Robinson's article on SeacoastNH.com.

Ona Maria Judge

Ona Maria Judge, a house slave of George Washington, escaped to Portsmouth in 1796. Washington attempted to retrieve her, but was unsuccessful. Washington authorized his agents to use force if necessary to compel Judge to return to his household, but officials in Portsmouth protected Judge and warned her when Washington's agent came to town. She married John Staines of Portsmouth in 1797 and they had two daughters. She lived in Portsmouth until her death. Learn more about Judge and read letters Washington wrote in his efforts to reclaim her on the Weeks Public Library's website.

Jack Kerouac

Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922, and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 21, 1969, at the age of 47. Kerouac's parents were born in Quebec and married in Nashua, New Hampshire. Kerouac's extended family had deep roots in the region’s Franco-American community, and he spoke French exclusively until he was seven years old. Jack Kerouac first gained literary notice with the 1950 publication of his autobiographical novel, The Town and the City, a tale of his coming of age in Lowell and New York City. His 1957 novel On the Road was a literary and cultural sensation that led to his being labeled the “Father of the Beat Generation.” He went on to write and publish more than 20 books of prose and poetry. Learn more about Kerouac and On the Road from National Public Radio.

Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, in 1925, into a nominally observant Reform Jewish family that lived next door to the Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a teaching order. Here she attended the first few years of primary school, which, she says, accounts for the juxtaposition of Jesus and Jewish rituals in many of her poems. She attained a BA and MA from Radcliffe College and was a Scholar in 1962-3 at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. In 1973, Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country, her fourth book of poems. She also has received the Aiken Taylor Prize, the Poets' Prize for Looking for Luck, and the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress before that post was renamed Poet Laureate of the United States, and as the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994. Kumin lives with her husband of 59 years on an old farm in central New Hampshire. Learn more about Kumin and her work on her website.

Bertha Lindsay

Bertha Lindsay, the last surviving eldress of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, known as the Shaker Society, died in 1990 at the age of 93. She came to Canterbury Shaker Village as a seven-year-old orphan in 1905. The community, founded in 1792, was a communal society of shared property; followers were devoted to celibacy, simple living, and pacifism. The Shakers, who included free-form and choreographed dance in their worship, were an offshoot of the Shaking Quakers from England. They are thought to have derived their name from a belief that shaking from religious fervor was a manifestation of inner spiritual experience. Lindsay lost her sight when she was 90 years old and put her remaining energies into making audio recordings about the history of the movement. ''I want people to know we did have fun and plenty of it,'' she said in an interview. Learn more about the Shakers and their legacy on the Canterbury Shaker Village website.

William Loeb

William Loeb (1905-1995) was the highly controversial publisher of the Manchester Union Leader from 1946 when he founded the paper, combining two newspapers he had purchased, The Manchester Union and the Evening Leader, until his death. Loeb used his newspapers to vigorously attack his perceived enemies and to push his conservative agenda. He created the anti-tax "Pledge" and made his newspaper a powerful force in New Hampshire politics and in its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Loeb's widow, Nackey Loeb, became publisher of the Union Leader following his death and went on to found the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications before her death in 2000. Learn more about Loeb in this piece from Time Magazine.

Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe was selected from among more than 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher in space. She died in the Challenger Shuttle explosion in 1986, leaving behind a powerful legacy through her passion for teaching. McAuliffe was born on September 2, 1948. As a young woman she witnessed the excitement over the Apollo moon landing program, and wrote years later on her astronaut application form that "I watched the Space Age being born and I would like to participate." McAuliffe and her husband, Steven, moved to Concord, New Hampshire, in 1978 when Steven accepted a job as an assistant to the state attorney general.   Christa took a teaching post at Concord High School in 1982, and in 1984 learned about NASA's efforts to locate an educator to fly on the Shuttle.   NASA selected McAuliffe in the summer of 1984 and in the fall she took a year-long leave of absence from teaching to train for an early 1986 Shuttle mission. McAuliffe's contributions as a teacher and as an astronaut were memorialized through the creation of the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord.  Learn more about McAuliffe on the Planetarium's website.

Grace Metalious

Grace Metalious was born into poverty and a broken home as Marie Grace de Repentigny in Manchester, NH. She began writing at an early age and published several pieces in the school newspaper as a student at Central High School in Manchester. She married George Metalious in 1943, became a housewife and mother, lived in near squalor — and continued to write. In 1956, she captured the attention of an editor with Peyton Place, which became publishing's second "blockbuster" (following Gone with the Wind in 1936). Reviled by the clergy and dismissed by most critics as "trash," it nevertheless remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and became an international phenomenon. Peyton Place was also adapted into highly successful film and television productions. Her other novels, which never achieved the same success as her first, were Return to Peyton Place (1959), The Tight White Collar (1961) and No Adam in Eden (1963). Metalious died from complications of alcoholism on February 25, 1964. "If I had to do it over again," she once remarked, "it would be easier to be poor." She is buried in Smith Meeting House Cemetery in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Learn more about Metalious in this profile that appeared in Vanity Fair in March, 2006.

Tad Mosel

Tad Mosel was born in Ohio in 1922. He won a Pulitzer Prize for All the Way Home, his 1960 Broadway dramatization of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. The play opened on Nov. 30, 1960, on Broadway at the Belasco Theater, but even with fine reviews and a script that won a Pulitzer Prize ticket sales were slow, and the producers posted closing notices four separate times, including on the day after opening night. Each time, ticket sales picked up, creating a series of last-minute rescues that newspapers began referring to as “The Miracle on 44th Street.” It finally closed on Sept. 16, 1961, after 333 performances. During the golden age of live television in the 1950s, Mosel was a major contributor of original scripts for dramatic anthology series such as “Goodyear Television Playhouse,” “Studio One” and “Playhouse 90.” Mosel spent his last years in Concord, NH, where he died in August, 2008. Learn more about Mosel in this piece from the New York Public Library website where his papers are collected.

P.J. O'Rourke

Patrick Jake O'Rourke was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1947. He attended Miami University of Ohio, majoring in English, and received an M.A. in English at Johns Hopkins. In 1972, O'Rourke went to work at National Lampoon, where he became Editor-in-Chief in 1978. He has since written a number of best-selling collections of humorous political essays and writes for scores of publications. O'Rourke divides his time between Washington, D.C. and New Hampshire, and is an H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute. Read one of O'Rourke's recent syndicated columns.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsboro, NH, in 1804. He attended Bowdoin College where he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. The two remained life-long friends. At 24 he was elected to the New Hampshire legislature; two years later he became its Speaker. During the 1830's he went to Washington, first as a Representative, then as a Senator. After serving in the Mexican War, Pierce was encouraged by New Hampshire friends to pursue the Presidential nomination in 1852. At the Democratic Convention, the delegates agreed upon a platform pledging undeviating support of the Compromise of 1850 and hostility to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. They balloted 48 times and eliminated all the well-known candidates before nominating Pierce. Two months before he took office, he and his wife saw their eleven-year-old son killed when their train was wrecked. Grief-stricken, Pierce entered the Presidency nervously exhausted. Pierce struggled to lead the nation through the increasingly bitter debate over slavery and its expansion. To his disappointment, the Democrats refused to renominate him, turning to the less controversial Buchanan. Pierce returned to New Hampshire, leaving his successor to face the rising fury of the sectional whirlwind. He died in 1869. Learn more about Pierce on the website of the Pierce Manse in Concord.

Marilla Ricker

Born in New Durham, NH in 1840, Marilla Ricker was brought up a “free thinker,” a suffragist and a Whig. She taught school until her marriage to John Ricker of Dover, a well-to-do farmer who died in 1868 leaving her a wealthy widow. She began the study of law in Washington, D.C. in 1876 and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia in 1882, taking the examination with eighteen men, all of whom she outranked. She practiced in Washington for many years and was known as the “prisoners’ friend” from her habit of visiting jails and prisons, and applying for releases and pardons. She often worked for her clients for free. She became New Hampshire’s first woman lawyer in July, 1890. Although she was certified to try cases before the US Supreme Court and even ran for state governor, Ricker was still unable to vote. She was reportedly the first woman in NH to attempt to register to vote. She went on registering and being denied the vote until 1920 when just months before her death, she voted legally for the first time. Learn more about Ricker on the website of the NH Women's Bar Association.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born March 1, 1848 in Dublin, Ireland. Six months later, the family immigrated to New York City. Upon completion of school at age thirteen, he expressed strong interest in art, so his father apprenticed him to a cameo cutter. While working days at his cameo lathe, Augustus also took art classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. At 19, his apprenticeship completed, he traveled to Paris where he studied under Francois Jouffry at the renowned Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1870, he left Paris for Rome, where for the next five years, he studied classical art and architecture, and worked on his first commissions. In 1876 he received his first major commission; a monument to Civil War Admiral David Glasgow Farragut. Perhaps his greatest achievement during this period was the Shaw Memorial (right) unveiled on Boston Common in 1897. Described as Saint-Gaudens' "symphony in bronze," this masterpiece took 14 years to complete. Diagnosed with cancer in 1900, he decided to live in Cornish, NH, year round, a place where he had spent many summers. For the next seven years, despite diminishing energy, he continued to work, producing a steady stream of reliefs and public sculpture. Saint-Gaudens died in Cornish on August 3, 1907. Learn more about Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site on the National Park Service's website.

May Sarton

May Sarton was born on May 3, 1912 in Wondelgem, Belgium. She and her family were forced to flee after the invasion by the Reichswehr in 1915, and the family settled in Boston when Sarton was just four years old. After the death of her father, Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. She later relocated to York, Maine, where she spent the last 20 years of her life. Sarton's collections of poetry include Coming Into Eighty (1994), Collected Poems: 1930-1993 (1993), Halfway to Silence (1980), A Private Mythology (1966), The Lion and the Rose (1948), and Encounter in April (1937). She also published many autobiographical works and novels, notably Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), in which she revealed her homosexuality to the reading public. She died on July 16, 1995. Learn more about Sarton on the website of the Harvard Square Library.

Alan Shepard

Alan Shepard was born on November 18, 1923, in East Derry, New Hampshire. Shepard was one of the Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959, and he holds the distinction of being the first American to journey into space. Shepard made his second space flight as Spacecraft Commander on Apollo 14, January 31 - February 9, 1971. He was accompanied on the third lunar landing mission by Stuart A. Roosa, Command Module Pilot, and Edgar D. Mitchell, Lunar Module Pilot. Maneuvering their lunar module "Antares" to a landing in the hilly upland Fra Mauro region of the moon, Shepard and Mitchell subsequently conducted numerous experiments and collected almost 100 pounds of lunar samples. Shepard died in 1998. Learn more about Shepard on the website of the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium (soon to become the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center).

Walter Theo Silver

New Hampshire native Walter Theo Silver was a surveyor, historian, archaeologist, and wildlife biologist. As a boy he listened carefully to the stories his grandfather told him about the town proprietors, the founding fathers of the King's Plantation of Contoocook going back to 1732. With the help of his wife, Linnea Stadig Silver, Silver began to write down his recollections of the history of his two home towns of Boscawen and Webster in From the King's Plantation to Home Town Heritage: Boscawen and Webster, New Hampshire.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he experienced a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was 21. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. Since then he has published 20 collections , including That Little Something (2008), My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. His prose poetry collection The World Doesn't End won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Simic was appointed the 15th United States Poet Laureate in 2007. Read more about Simic in this piece from the New York Times.

David Souter

David Souter was born in Melrose, Massachusetts but spent most of his childhood and adolescence at his family's farm in Weare, New Hampshire. After earning degrees from Harvard University and Magdalen College at Oxford University, Souter returned to New Hampshire in 1966 to work for the law firm of Orr and Reno. In 1976, New Hampshire Gov. Meldrin Thompson appointed Souter as Attorney General. In 1978, Souter became an associate justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court. Newly elected New Hampshire governor John Sununu appointed Souter to the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1983. Seven years later, as President George Bush's Chief of Staff, Sununu recommended Souter for a position on the U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit. Just months later, Souter was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, winning Senate confirmation in October by a vote of 90 to 9. During his years on the bench, Souter gradually established himself as an influential moderate with a respect for precedent and for adhering to the rule of law. Souter remains a staunch opponent of televising court proceedings, remarking in 1996, "I can tell you the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body." Learn more about Justice Souter on the FindLaw website.

General John Stark

John Stark was born in 1728 in Londonderry, NH. He fought in the French and Indian Wars and at the start of the Revolution he distinguished himself at Bunker Hill. He served in the Quebec campaign and with George Washington at Princeton and Trenton (1776-77). He went home in 1777, disgruntled over promotions, but later in the year took the field as a commander of the New Hampshire militia in the Saratoga campaign. When General Burgoyne sent a detachment to take the colonial stores at Bennington (now in Vermont), Stark met and repulsed it. For this service Stark received appointment as brigadier general from the Congress. He died in 1822. Learn more about Stark in Isabel Tarant's article on SeacoastNH.com.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982),A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary and The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001). Her most recent book is Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture. Learn more about Ulrich and her work on her publisher's website.
Learn how works such as A Midwife's Tale are researched at DoHistory.org.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817. While he lived the majority of his life in Concord, Thoreau traveled to other States including New York, New Hampshire and Maine, which inspired many essays and The Maine Woods (1864). Thoreau attended Harvard University where he studied the classics as well as science and math, graduating in 1837. He returned to his beloved Concord and worked in his father's pencil factory. In the 1850's Thoreau became a land surveyor, an occupation which afforded him time to go for long walks. He kept lengthy and detailed journal accounts of his travels; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is based on a trip he took with his brother. "I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, .... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me." Thoreau wrote on myriad topics, often including poetry and anecdotes. His classic work, Walden, is an account of his efforts to live off the land in the forest near Walden Pond in Concord, MA. This 1854 work is often credited as the start of the conservation movement. He was a frequent climber of NH's Mount Monadnock and wrote of it in several of his works. Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862 and now rests in the Thoreau family plot of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Learn more about Thoreau and Monadnock on the Mondadnock.net website.
Learn more about Thoreau's legacy on the website of the Walden Woods Project.

Earl Tupper

Earl Silas Tupper was born in 1907. During his youth and boyhood, his mother took in laundry and ran a boarding house, while his father operated a small family farm. Tupper loved to tinker, developing labor-saving devices for the farm and family greenhouses; one of his devices, a frame to facilitate the cleaning of chickens, was granted a patent. He went to work for DuPont in 1937, but stayed there only one year. Later, Tupper would say it was at Dupont "that my education really began." Tupper took the experience he had gained in plastics design and manufacturing at DuPont and struck out on his own. In 1938, he formed the Earl S. Tupper Company, advertising the design and engineering of industrial plastics products in Leominster, Massachusetts. Plastic was still in its infancy in the forties, and the commercial market was limited by plastic's reputation for being brittle, greasy, smelly and generally unreliable. Tupper developed a method for purifying black polyethylene slag, a waste product produced in oil refinement, into a substance that was flexible, tough, non-porous, non-greasy and translucent. He also developed the Tupper seal, an airtight, watertight lid modeled on the lid for paint containers. Together, these innovations laid the foundations for the future success of Tupperware. In 1958, Tupper sold out to Justin Dart of Rexall Drug Company for $16 million, divorced his wife, and bought an island in Central America. He eventually moved to Costa Rica, giving up his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes. Tupper died on October 5, 1983. Learn more about Tupper on the website of PBS' American Experience.

Steven Tyler

Born Stephen Victor Tallarico on March 26, 1948 in Yonkers, New York, Steven Tyler is considered  one of rock’s greatest showmen. The son of a music teacher, he started playing drums, but then focused on singing. After moving to Boston in the late 1960s, Tyler met up with the musicians that would form the rock group Aerosmith. The band played its first gig in 1970 and shared an apartment in Boston. In 1972, Aerosmith signed a contract with Columbia Records. The following year their self-titled debut album was released. It featured the song “Dream On,” which was a minor hit. But with their third album, Toys in the Attic (1975), the band emerged as a leading rock group. The group disbanded for a time, but the original members of Aerosmith reformed and made a comeback with 1987s Permanent Vacation. With the rise of the cable music channel MTV, the band’s videos helped them win over a new generation of fans. Tyler is the father of four children, including actress Liv Tyler. He lives in Massachusetts, but continues to summer in New Hampshire. Learn more about Tyler on the Aerosmith website.

Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children. It was on his uncle's farm in Hannibal that Clemens spent many boyhood summers playing in the slave quarters, listening to tall tales and the slave spirituals that he would enjoy throughout his life. At 18, Clemens headed east to New York City and Philadelphia where he worked on several newspapers. In 1857 he returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. In 1865, Twain's first break came with the publication of his short story, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in papers across the country. Twain and Olivia (Livy) Langdon were married in 1870. They settled in Buffalo, New York where Twain had become a partner, editor and writer for the daily newspaper the Buffalo Express. In an effort to be closer to his publisher, Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut in 1871. In 1872, Twain's recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book, Roughing It. For the next 17 years (1874-1891), Twain and his family lived in the Hartford home. During those years he completed some of his most famous works. Novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) captured both his Missouri memories and depictions of the American scene. Twain made frequent visits to New Hampshire to visit friends such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich in Portsmouth and Celia Thaxter at the Isles of Shoals. He also spent two productive summers in the Monadnock Region. Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster was born in Salisbury (now Franklin), New Hampshire and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College. He studied law, taught briefly and was admitted to the New Hampshire bar in 1805. His law practice soon led him into political activities, and he represented his home state in Congress from 1813 to 1817. His participation in the Dartmouth College case and McCulloch v. Maryland left an enormous imprint on American constitutional law. Webster also matured into one of the great orators of his era, delivering notable speeches at the bicentennial of the founding of Plymouth in 1820 and the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825. From 1845 to 1850, Webster served in the Senate where he worked on behalf of the Compromise of 1850. Webster was personally opposed to slavery, but accommodated Southern concerns because of his deeply held belief that the preservation of the Union was more important than any other issue. This position cost him the support of anti-slavery groups in the North. From 1850 until his death in 1852, Webster was Secretary of State under Millard Fillmore. Learn more about Webster and his birthplace in Franklin on the website of the NH State Parks.

John Wentworth

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s last British leader did his best to keep peace, but John and Frances Wentworth had to flee. Royal Governor at the breaking point of the Revolution, Wentworth was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite his friendship with his citizens, Wentworth and his family were driven out of Portsmouth in 1775, never to see his homeland again. Learn more about Wentworth on SeacoastNH.com.

Thornton Wilder

Novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin on April 17, 1897. Writing ran in the family. His father Amos was an editor and journalist and his mother Isabella, a poet. The family lived in Madison until 1906 when they moved to Hong Kong when Wilder's father was appointed American consul general. Wilder attended Oberlin College and Yale University and received his Master's degree from Princeton in 1926. During the 1920s, to support himself, Wilder taught French and English at various schools and wrote scripts for silent films.  He wrote his first novel, The Cabela, in 1926. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. Wilder wrote long sections of the book at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Wilder was a playwright as well as a novelist. Our Town (1938), a look at small-town American life, brought Wilder the 1938 Pulitzer Prize in drama. Set in the fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, Wilder again wrote much of the play during a MacDowell Colony residency. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize in drama. The Matchmaker (1954), one of Wilder's more successful works, evolved into the musical comedy Hello, Dolly.  Wilder died in 1975. Learn more about Wilder on the website of the Thornton Wilder Society.

Harriet E. Wilson

In 1859, Harriet Wilson, a mulatto woman from New Hampshire published a novel with the stated hope of earning sufficient money simply to survive. Instead, her novel Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of A Free Black became a powerful and controversial narrative that continues to touch and unsettle readers around the world. Learn more about Wilson on the Harriet Wilson Project's website.