About this item

A masterful portrait of an essential and unexamined American writer.When war broke out in Europe in 1914, a twenty-six-year-old Harvard writing instructor named Henry Sheahan volunteered with the American Field Service in France. After serving as an ambulance driver on the western front (and witnessing the horrific battle of Verdun) , Sheahan, now going by the pen name Henry Beston, began to write children's stories (his fairy tales were immensely popular with the children of his Harvard classmate and close friend Theodore Roosevelt) . In September of 1926, Beston spent a two-week vacation in a Cape Cod shack he'd built high on an isolated stretch of dunes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. As he later wrote, "the fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.