Innocence Under the Elms

by Louise Dickinson Rich

No description available.

283 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Writer known for fiction and non-fiction works about New England, particularly Massachusetts and Maine. Mrs. Rich grew up in Bridgewater where her father was the editor of a weekly newspaper. She met Ralph Eugene Rich, a Chicago businessman, on a Maine canoe trip in 1933 and they married a year later. Mr. Rich died in 1944. Her best-known work was her first book, the autobiographical We Took to the Woods, (1942) set in the 1930s when she and husband Ralph, and her friend and hired help Gerrish, lived in a remote cabin near Lake Umbagog. It was described as "a witty account of a Thoreau-like existence in a wilderness home

Reviews

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have ever felt like you don't quite fit in, if you ever wanted to know what it really felt like to grow up in the early part of the 20th century, if you've ever sat through a long church service and tried to entertain yourself, if you've ever had the first moment of realizing no-one in the world knows exactly where you are...all that and so very much more is contained in this amazing memoir. I've read it probably 10 times, and could read it 10 more times happily. One of the best authors you'll ever encounter.

[Avis Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Innocence Under the Elms is something of a model about how to write a memoir. The author was raised quite literally in the world of letters, being the child of a man who owned, edited, and printed a newspaper.

Rich's book is the most thorough account of a young life that I've ever read, and it is filled with the sort of detail that other writers forget to include because they just can't recall it. Rich knows how to spend just the right amount of time with each observation she makes and no more, and she knows how to make every detail hit home. The book's only flaw is that it is just a bit long, but it's still an extremely evocative account. Innocence Under the Elms is highly recommended if you want to read about life in New England in the early 1900s.

Note: I was curious about the author's hint that the Dickinsons may be related to Emily Dickinson, but after looking it up, they appear to be a different Dickinson family. It's likely this was a family story that was passed down incorrectly to the author by her father. But the author is indeed a distant cousin of John Greenleaf Whittier through her mother's side of the family, which is a detail her family appears not to have known.

Available at Open Library:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18336...

[Hayden Forest · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vividly remembered memoir of childhood in a small Massachusetts town during the early Progressive Era. Dickinson tells of her life in a slightly outcast family (newcomers and Democrats in a Republican town), moving from house to house and all the attendant neighborhood adventures. It was fascinating to read about her father and mother’s work as writers-editors-publishers of their own local newspaper. I also enjoyed her chapter on her family’s annual 10 day vacation to her grandmother’s lakeside cabin.

[Christine McCann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed and insightful memoir of growing up in small town Massachusetts in the early twentieth century.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm taking the unusual step of starting a review before we finish this book, because of a nice confluence of events. I will probably have more to say when we finish it.
The "we" means my librarian wife and I. She has been reading it aloud to me over the past few days. The opening paragraphs reminded me of what I remembered from the opening of Our Town, as recounted in Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake, which we had read last year. When we saw Our Town on Broadway yesterday, I was convinced that the connection must be even more direct. The first edition of this novel was published about 15 years after Wilder's play; both are set in roughly the same period.
Of course, this memoir is about a real town -- which happens to be the one I live in -- and Wilder's town is very intentionally not a real town. But both are iconic New England towns of the same period, and their basic geographies could be framed in the same way.