The Country of the Pointed Firs

An unnamed woman writer comes to the small Maine fishing village of Dunnet Landing to find the quiet she needs to work, and boards with Mrs. Almira Todd — a widow who gathers and sells herbs, large, shrewd, and warm-hearted, who becomes her guide and friend. Over a single summer the narrator is drawn into the life of the place: she rents the empty schoolhouse to write in, listens to old Captain Littlepage and his strange tale of a town at the edge of the next world, sails out to a green island to meet Mrs. Todd's aged mother, and joins a great family reunion that draws the scattered kin of the coast together for a day.

Almost nothing, in the ordinary sense, happens — and that is the book's quiet genius. Through a string of visits, conversations, and excursions, Jewett gives the complete sense of a place and its people: their kindness and their reticence, the weight of the lives behind their few words, and a vanishing coastal world of old fishermen and widows whose best days are behind them. It is a portrait of a community, and an elegy for it, disguised as a summer's idle record.

First published in 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs is the central masterpiece of American literary regionalism and one of the most admired short books in the language. Spare, exact, and deeply felt, it works by mood rather than plot — by the cadence of real Maine speech and by the dark ranks of fir along a still inlet. Willa Cather, who learned from Jewett and revered her, named it among the very few American books certain to last, beside The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the book's making and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.