THE WRITE STUFF | BY JAMES S. RUGEN ’70
FEATURED WRITER: Gerald Warner Brace ’18 (1901–78)
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best-selling author, praised by critics and widely honored, Gerald Warner Brace ’18 achieved national and international recognition as a writer of fiction. In his long career as a writer and teacher, he earned a devoted following of readers and influenced many young and aspiring writers. He was a 1958 National Book Award nominee for fiction and the 1967 recipient of the Shell Award for Distinguished Writing from Boston University. In his essay “Gerald Warner Brace: Forgotten New England Novelist” (The New England Quarterly, June 1999), Norman Pettit writes: “Though his name is no longer familiar, Gerald Warner Brace was a well-known writer in his time — a New England novelist of high repute. From 1936, when his first novel was published, he established himself as a chronicler of New England life, not only along the coast of Maine but also in the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont. His most popular novel, The Garretson Chronicle, was promoted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 while he was serving on the faculty at Boston University, where the creative writing program still awards a prize in his name.” Brace spent many summers at Deer Isle, Maine, where he loved to sail the 32-foot sloop he designed and where he was inspired by the island’s boat-
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builders and fishermen. In his novels, he depicted New England with nostalgia and appreciation for traditional ways but also with an understanding of the forces of change. Brace excelled in depicting hardy New Englanders, some struggling in harsh conditions to maintain the ways and values of the past, others choosing newer opportunities and a turning away from tradition. Such is the case in his first novel, The Islands, in which a young man is caught between becoming a boatbuilder on his island or pursuing an education at Harvard. In later novels, set in various New England locales, Brace continued to examine characters as they navigate between different ways of life. The Garretson Chronicle, probably Brace’s best-known novel, is described by C. Hugh Holman in his introduction to the W.W. Norton 1964 reprinting as “a story that hinges on a recurrent conflict between self and society through three generations of a family, and as such it becomes almost a representation of transcendentalism in its long, slow decline as it exists in a world that gives less and less value to the individual.” The novel is set in fictional Compton, Massachusetts, a thinlydisguised Concord. In The Spire and his last novel, The Department, Brace depicts academic settings with a critical and satiric eye, based on his
Photo of Gerald Warner Brace reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Works of Gerald Warner Brace The Islands (1936) The Wayward Pilgrims (1938) Light on a Mountain (1941) The Garretson Chronicle (1947) A Summer’s Tale (1949) The Spire (1952) Bell’s Landing (1955) The Age of the Novel (1957) The World of Carrick’s Cove (1957) Winter Solstice (1960) The Wind’s Will (1964) Between Wind and Water (1966) The Department (1968) The Stuff of Fiction (1969) Days that Were (1976)