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How George Washington Recruited a Whole New Army Under British Noses

George Washington had a problem he believed no one had ever encountered before. On January 1, 1776, the Continental Army would disappear unless Washington recruited enough men to replace it.

Somehow, he managed.

It wasn’t quite like that.

His ragtag fighting force, strung out along the hills surrounding Boston, had bottled up British troops despite having little gunpowder, inferior weapons and no heavy artillery. Nearly all enlistments expired on December 31. But somehow Washington recruited a whole new army within firing range of the world’s most powerful fighting force.

On Jan. 4, 1776, he wrote a letter to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, to explain.

“It is not in the pages of History perhaps, to furnish a case like ours, to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six months together without — and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance, of Twenty off British regiments, is probably more than ever was attempted.”

George Washington Recruited by Congress

The Continental Congress authorized a standing army on June 14, 1775, and the next day named George Washington “captain general” of American fighting forces.

It took nine days for Washington to ride from Philadelphia to Cambridge, delayed by public demonstrations along the way. He arrived on July 2, 1775, 15 days after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He knew little about the battle, though he learned along the way that 1,000 British troops had perished during the conflict. They were still encamped on top of the hill, peppering the Americans with artillery fire.

Washington was dismayed at what he saw. Few soldiers had uniforms or tents, and they lived in shantytowns of lumber and cloth. Some lived in vacated Tory homes, in one case, 250 men to a house. They hadn’t dug latrines and the camps stank.

The officers were not only ignorant and quarrelsome but scandalously disobedient, wrote Washington’s aide Joseph Reed to Elias Boudinot on Aug. 13, 1775. “Many had proven themselves notorious cowards.”

It took him a week to find out how many men he commanded.

He thought he had 20,000. He had 16,500 and only 14,000 were fit for duty. The rest were sick or wounded. The british had 6,000, but he figured they could form a fighting force of 12,000 if they armed slaves and Loyalists left in Boston.

“We are in an exceeding dangerous situation,” he wrote to his friend Richard Henry Lee on July 10.

Gunpowder

In early August, Washington learned the shocking truth about his gunpowder supply. During a war council, he was told his men barely had enough gunpowder for eight, maybe nine rounds each.

For a half hour, Washington sat in silence before speaking again, reported one of his generals, John Sullivan.

From then on, Washington didn’t dare order a morning or evening gun fired. When the British bombarded his forces with cannonade he couldn’t order their fire returned.

General Gage by John Singleton Copley

Fortunately, the enemy couldn’t believe how bad things were, according to the journal of Elias Boudinot. A member of the Committee of Safety of Massachusetts knew the secret, wrote Boudinot. He deserted and went over to Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander, and told him.

“The fact was so incredible that General Gage treated it as a stratagem of war and the informant as a spy, or coming with the express purpose of deceiving him and drawing his army into a snare, by which mean we were saved from having our quarters beaten up,” wrote Boudinot.

“Few people know the predicament we are in,” wrote Washington to his friend Joseph Reed.

Had they known, the American Revolution might have ended right then and there.

Countermoves

On November 16, Washington ordered a 25-year-old former bookseller named Henry Knox, a colonel, to ask Congress for cannon. If he couldn’t get any, he should go to Fort Ticonderoga, captured in May, to retrieve the heavy artillery.

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

He also sent two men – his muster-master general, Stephen Moylan, and Col. John Glover — to outfit privateers to capture unarmed enemy supply ships. On November 29, Capt. John Manley, commanding the privateer Lee, captured the British brigantine Nancy, along with thousands of musket, shot and a cannon.

Washington also knew about a lightly guarded cache of gunpowder in the British colony of Bermuda. So he asked Rhode Island Gov. Nicholas Cooke to send an armed vessel to the island to capture it. Cooke obliged, sending Abraham Whipple on the mission.

But the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. Congress also sent an armed vessel to Bermuda to steal the British store of gunpowder there. Bermudans who shared the colonies’ displeasure with Britain stole enough gunpowder to quadruple Washington’s supply. When Whipple arrived, the powder was already on its way to Washington.

The Army Dwindles

On October 31, King George III delivered a speech to Parliament declaring the Americans in open rebellion and asking for more troops to put down the uprising.

King George III

Winter was coming. Washington’s army had few blankets and no winter clothing. Enlistments started to expire on December 1 and every man could leave on January 1.

The patriotic fervor that inspired thousands to rush to Boston had worn off. Men started to flock back home. Whole regiments packed up and left.

By late November, Washington had only 3,500 men. “Could I have foreseen what I have, & am like to experience, no consideration upon Earth should have induced me to accept this Command,” he wrote in a Nov. 28, 1775 letter to Joseph Reed.

How Washington Recruited an Army

Enlistments came in slowly. News of the army’s harsh condition had spread. Washington, too, had introduced discipline: the lash, the pillory and the court martial.

And so the army offered a signing bonus: a dollar, big money in those days.

Joseph Plumb Martin described the allure of a dollar on a drum head.

A dollar deposited upon the drum head was taken by some one as soon as placed there, and the holder’s name taken, and he enrolled . . . My spirits began to revive at the sight of the money offered; the seeds of courage began to sprout . . . O, thought I, if I were but old enough to put myself forward, I would be the possessor of one dollar, the dangers of war notwithstanding.

Some enlistees tried to game the system, waiting until the last minute to enlist in the hopes the army in its desperation would raise the bounty.

On New Year’s Eve Washington had 9,650 men – about half of what Congress authorized.

Nathanael Greene

To minimize disruption, Washington asked the men who enlisted for 1776 to join their new regiment a few days before the new year. He asked dismissed soldiers to stay longer and called up militias to reinforce the army.

On Jan. 1, 1776, Washington ordered the soldiers who didn’t reenlist to their parade grounds. They were then sent home, leaving by the hundreds and thousands.

Gen. Nathanael Greene lost three-fourths of his brigade and had fewer than 700 men.

Slowly, the Continental Army returned to its strength of 1775. The British stayed put, failing to take advantage of their enemy’s weakened position. By March, Henry Knox would arrived with his noble artillery train, and the British would soon evacuate.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Nutshell Studies: Frances Glessner Lee and the Dollhouses of Death

In 1929, a depressed, divorced 51-year-old society matron decided to take up murder as a hobby. Frances Glessner Lee had just closed her New Hampshire antiques business, and she was looking for something to do. Chance and a family friend led her to create 20 crime scenes in dollhouses. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Frances Glessner Lee

Frances Glessner Lee for years featured her macabre dollhouses in weeklong training seminars for homicide detectives at Harvard. They’d spend hours figuring out how her dolls got bitten, stabbed, hanged, beaten and shot. Lee provided them with exquisitely crafted and accurately proportioned clues. A pencil made from a toothpick had real lead in it, while nail polish blood spatters were scientifically accurate.

“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this,” filmmaker John Waters told the New York Times after seeing her work.

Dorothy Dennison, a high school student, was found dead in the Parsonage Parlor after her mother reported her missing. She’d gone to the store to buy hamburg meat. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Godmother

Plump and grandmotherly, Frances Lee had no business dabbling in criminology. She was a woman for one thing, and she had no formal education. But she used her money, her connections and her passion for dollhouses to change the way police investigate murders. Her philanthropy earned her the nickname “godmother of forensic science.”

Her most visible legacy – her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — survives to this day and is still used to train detectives. Several books have been written about them. In 2017 the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum displayed the restored dollhouses for three months. The exhibit attracted 100,000 visitors, wowed by the extraordinary craftsmanship and attention to detail.

The Creator of the Nutshell Studies

Frances Glessner was born March 25, 1878, in Chicago, an heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She grew up pampered and protected inside a stone fortress, a Prairie Avenue mansion designed by H.H. Richardson.

The Glessner House as it neared completion. Photo courtesy Cornell University Library.

The Glessner house stood out as a monumental architectural masterpiece among the other Gilded Age mansions on Prairie Avenue. Frances’ mother, an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, decorated the house in impeccable Arts and Crafts style.

Frances had one sibling, older brother George, who suffered from hay fever. The family doctor advised the Glessners to take George away from Chicago during hay fever season. So they built a summer home on 1,500 acres in Bethlehem, N.H., called The Rocks. Family friend Frederick Law Olmsted landscaped the estate. Both Frances and George would move there permanently as adults.

Harvard

When George reached college age, he went to Harvard. Frances wanted to join him and study medicine, but her father – her “jailer,” she once called him – wouldn’t let her. Instead, her parents sent her to Europe with an aunt for 14 months and encouraged her to pursue music and the crafts.

At Harvard, her brother formed a close friendship with George Magrath, a brilliant medical student. Magrath would later have a major impact on Frances’ life. Back then, he and her brother liked to jump on their bicycles and race each other to big fires in Cambridge or Boston.

The year before graduation, in 1893, George Magrath joined the Glessner family at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The next year, Magrath spent three days with the Glessners at The Rocks in New Hampshire. In his thank you letter to Mrs. Glessner, he wrote, “My visit besides being the source of much immediate pleasure has left with me the refreshing picture of a corner of the universe where the beautiful and the ideal are very fully realized and where true happiness exists.”

Lonely and Terrified

Frances found little happiness. She once wrote at 73, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived.”

In 1898, just shy of her 20^th birthday, Frances Glessner married Blewitt Lee, a lawyer 10 years her senior. She barely knew him. Her father built them a house near his own in Chicago, and they had three children. Frances left her husband several times and then finally divorced him in 1914. Her father packed her and the children off to Santa Barbara in disgrace.

When Frances created her Nutshell Studies, most of the victims were women who died violent deaths at home. Perhaps she was commenting on her own marriage. Or was she expressing her feelings about the domestic role foisted on her?

After World War I she moved east, splitting her time between Boston and The Rocks. She and her daughter, Frances, opened an antiques shop in New Hampshire. But that enterprise ended just before she checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in 1929 for surgery.

Coincidentally, her old friend George Magrath was there, too.

Could this be a clue to a murder? In the 1930s, homicide detectives didn’t get any training to to determine whether it was or not. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

George Magrath

Florence Glessner Lee and George Burgess Magrath had such a close friendship that people wonder if they were lovers. Lee’s biographer, Bruce Goldfarb, doesn’t think so. He told an audience at the Kansas City Public Library that Magrath was probably gay.

Magrath was also eccentric. He ate one meal a day, typically at midnight at the St. Botolph’s Club. Big and rugged, he wore his hair long, smoked a calabash pike and always wore a flowing Windsor tie.

He had one weakness, wrote Goldfarb. Alcohol. Magrath maintained a steady state of intoxication. Perhaps he needed to self-medicate during a lifetime in which he investigated 21,000 deaths and testified in 2,000 trials.

In 1929, Magrath needed treatment for a severe bacterial infection of his hands. He had served as the Suffolk County Medical Examiner since 1907, the first medical examiner with training in pathology. (He shared the office with Dr. Timothy Leary, father of the LSD crusader of the same name.)

Turning Point

Recuperating at Mass General with Frances, George Magrath entertained – no, enthralled — her with stories about his work. He had examined corpses in the Boston Molasses Flood, solved the Frederick Small case and proved a gun belonging to Niccolo Sacco had killed a victim in an armed robbery.

He said he refused to rely on hunches during his investigations. And he told her no medical school gave adequate training for medical examiners, while detectives had no training at all. George and Frances talked about the evils of elected coroners, vulnerable to political pressure during murder investigations.

Frances Glessner Lee left the hospital with renewed purpose. She began reading up on criminology and collecting books and papers on the subject. In 1931, she gave Harvard Medical School $250,000 to endow a chair of Legal Medicine for George Magrath, who had taught there for years.

In 1934 she donated 1,000 books to Harvard to start the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. Magrath, she said, had practically invented the field. The library opened in 1938 with training tools such as specimens of insects that infest corpses.

Then George Magrath died on Dec. 11, 1938.

The Nutshell Studies

By then, Frances’ father, mother and brother had died and she could dispose of the family fortune as she liked. So she made dollhouses.

It was a popular hobby among wealthy women of the era. Frances Glessner Lee had a friend in Chicago, Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who created exquisite dioramas documenting European and American rooms over seven centuries.

The gorgeous Thorne miniature rooms now reside at the Museum of Fine Arts. Glessner’s lived-in, sometimes shabby homes belong to Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

She created lower-middle-class shacks, poor tenements and workers’ modest houses. Sex workers, housewives and farmers lived in them. For each dollhouse of death, Frances compiled case notes and witness statements drawn from real murder investigations.

In this “Pink Bathroom” Nutshell Study, Mrs. Rose Fishman, a widow, was found dead on the bathroom floor by the building janitor after people complained of a smell. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

She named her Nutshell Studies after a police saying, “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The Case of Annie Morrison

In one of the nutshell studies, Annie Morrison lies face down on the ground underneath her second-story porch. A wet rag and a clothespin lie next to her. According to the notes Frances wrote, an undertaker discovered a bullet in Annie Morrison’s chest. Her husband owned a revolver with a .22, but he denied murdering his wife. He said he had been sitting in the kitchen when he heard a noise. Out on the porch he found laundry blowing in the wind and a chair resting against the porch railing.

Did the husband do it? The solution to the crime had less importance than the ability to read clues, according to Frances.

Mrs. Agnes Butler, a neighbor, heard the Morrisons quarreling that morning. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Making the Nutshell Studies

Frances began making her nutshell studies in a workshop at The Rocks with carpenter Ralph Mosher and his son Alton.

They made everything to a 1:12 scale, the standard of the day. Frances consulted a forestry professor at Yale to find woods with fine enough grain to look real at that scale. She even knitted tiny clothes using pins and a magnifying glass. The Nutshell Studies had working mousetraps and carpet sweepers, real newspapers reproduced in miniature and murder victims that wore underwear under their bloodied clothing.

Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor. This is a detail from the crime scene, called Three Room Dwelling. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Once Frances bought a tiny, solid gold electric mixer, made for a charm bracelet, and painted it gray so it could sit on a miniature kitchen counter. After spending thousands of dollars on a miniature cabin, she took a blowtorch to it and half burned it down.

Nutshell Studies Get Studied

In 1943, the New Hampshire State Police named Frances as their educational director and commissioned her as a captain. From then on she liked people to call her Captain Lee.

In 1945, Captain Lee brought her Nutshell Studies to Harvard’s Medical Law department for the first of the twice-yearly Frances Glessner Lee Seminars on Legal Medicine. She brought in speakers from around the world and invited 25 to 30 police officers.

For a week, trainees spent the morning listening to lectures, then after lunch they examined the Nutshell Studies in a dark room. They got a flashlight, case notes, witness statements and 90 minutes to analyze the crime scene. Frances didn’t make them all were murder scenes. Some depicted accidents and suicides that just looked like murder.

The week ended with an elegant banquet at the Ritz-Carlton, planned to the last detail by Frances Glessner Lee. She bought a set of gilt-edged china for $8,000 to be used only for her seminars.

Rave Reviews

With her seminar and her Nutshell Studies, Frances Glessner Lee had a huge hit on her hands. In 1948, Erle Stanley Gardner attended to find plots for his Perry Mason novels. He wrote that police sought invitations to the seminars the way girls who aspire to be actresses sought bids from Hollywood. William P. Hancock, chief of the Maine State Police, raved about it, calling it the best of all the training sessions he attended. [botz]

Lee branched out, developing training courses for police officers in other states. Her granddaughter said she loved to be surrounded by young men in uniform. They called her “Mother.”

Marie Jones, a prostitute, was discovered dead by her landlady, Mrs. Shirley Flanagan. Her boyfriend claimed she’d committed suicide. Photo by Laurie Shaull.

Aftermath

Frances Glessner Lee died in New Hampshire on Jan. 2, 1962. Her friend Erle Stanley Gardner wrote her obituary in the Boston Globe. “I collect characters as other people collect postage stamps, and Capt. Lee was one of the rarer items in my book.” He dedicated his story, The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom, to her.

Harvard disbanded the Department of Legal Medicine in 1967, and loaned the Nutshell Studies to an alumnus appointed as Maryland’s chief medical examiner. Since then they have resided at Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, still used as a training tool.

Corinne May Botz in 2004 published a book of essays and photographs about the Nutshell Studies. Susan Marks released a film, “Of Dolls and Murder, in 2012.” Then in 2017, the Renwick Gallery restored them and put them on exhibit.

Now the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests uses The Rocks as the North Country Conservation & Education Center.

Though many of the old Prairie Avenue mansions are gone, the Glessner House remains as a museum.

This story last updated in 2023.

With thanks to The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz and 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb and Judy Melinek.
Images: Frances Glessner Lee by By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61712759. Nutshell Studies all by Lorie Shaull – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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The Story of Love Story: How Erich Segal Won Fame and Lost a Career

Before he wrote Love Story in 1968, Professor Erich Segal was a star on Yale’s campus. Not because he taught ancient Greek and Latin literature, but because he co-wrote the screenplay to the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. Segal’s celebrity helped fill a 600-seat hall for his lectures on classical civilization.

“I became a figure of awe to the kids here,” he told an interviewer. “On football weekends they’d bring their dates around to Ezra Stiles [house] and reverently point out the window of the study in which I’d written Yellow Submarine.”

But then Harper & Row published Love Story, his 131-page tearjerker about a rich Harvard jock and a poor brainy Cliffie who dies. Critics trashed the book, Yale denied him tenure and students at the Ezra Stiles College, where he lived as a resident scholar, campaigned to eject him.

But Love Story also made him a world-famous millionaire who hobnobbed with celebrities.

Erich Segal, Author of Love Story

He was born June 16, 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of three boys. Even as a child, Erich Segal wanted to be a writer. His father, an orthodox rabbi, wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. So Erich studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at Midwood High School. On afternoons he took the subway to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and in summer he took classes in Switzerland. He didn’t have much of a social life.

Segal did win election as class president and the Latin prize, so naturally he went to Harvard. He graduated as class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, something only T.S. Eliot had done. Then at Harvard he earned a master’s the next year and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1965.

Erich Segal

He had a penchant for pop culture, though. As a senior undergraduate, he wrote a play for the Hasty Pudding theatricals called The Big Fizz, something of a big flop. But then as a graduate student he wrote a spoof on the Iliad called Sing, Muse, performed at Harvard’s Leverett House. A producer saw it, liked it and took it off Broadway, where it ran for 39 shows. Richard Rodgers of Oklahoma! fame noticed it and invited Segal to work with him on a musical. And that’s how he eventually got to collaborate on the animated film, Yellow Submarine, released in 1968.

Back at Harvard

Segal had been teaching classic literature at Yale, but in 1968, he took a sabbatical at Harvard to write a screenplay. He stayed at Dunster House, where he grew friendly with two college roommates who later became famous.

Dunster House

Segal combined the roommates into the character of Oliver Barrett IV, the preppie jock with a poet’s heart. Oliver’s wealthy, powerful father opposes his marriage to Jenny Cavilleri, a baker’s daughter from Cranston, R.I.

In the story, Oliver defies his father and marries Jenny, who gives up a music scholarship to put him through law school. And then, at 25, she dies.

Segal later said he based the character of Jenny on a girl he had dated. And he based Oliver on Tommy Lee Jones, the sensitive jock, and his roommate, Al Gore.

Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones

“Gore] was always under pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps and that was the conflict, to keep up the family tradition,” Segal explained to a New York Times reporter in 1997.

Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore, Segal added.

Love Story

Love Story came as a shock – not because of sex or nudity, there was none. But as a book, its publisher thought it might sell a few thousand copies. And as a film, its producer thought it might make a small profit.

At first, Segal couldn’t interest anyone in his screenplay. Finally, his agent suggested he turn it into a book. Segal did just that.

And so Harper & Row decided to print 5,000 copies of Love Story in time for Valentine’s Day 1970. At the last minute, plans changed to 7,500 copies.

Then lightning struck. Network TV hostess Barbara Walters mentioned Love Story on air one morning.

[She] “began her program by saying: ‘I was up most of the night reading a book I couldn’t put down, and when I finished it, I was sobbing. I cried and cried’,” recalled Mel Zerman, a former Harper & Row executive, in an interview with the American Legends website.

“That’s all the women of America had to hear,” Zerman said. “By the time bookstores were opening all over the United States they were getting calls for a book called Love Story by someone you never heard of named Erich Segal. Harper went crazy. We were out of stock within hours….”

Love Story rocketed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and remained there for 41 weeks, ultimately selling 21 million copies.

Love Story, the Movie

As luck would have it, filming ended on Love Story, the movie, three days before Love Story, the book, hit the bookstores. Segal had finally sold his screenplay to Paramount Pictures.

Model-turned-starlet Ali MacGraw had read the script and liked it. She was then married to Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, and persuaded him to produce it. He thought it might make a small profit and gave it a limited budget of $2.2 million. A half-dozen future stars turned down the role of Oliver – including Michael Douglas, Jon Voight and Peter Fonda. Finally Ryan O’Neal took the part. And Tommy Lee Jones made his film debut as Oliver Barrett’s roommate Hank.

Arthur Hiller began directing the film in Massachusetts and New York even before the book came out. Most of the scenes took place in winter, and production at Harvard damaged the campus. Fake snow killed three trees, and the university denied many future requests to film there.

Hiller also shot the movie at the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Mass., the Boston Public Garden and at the frame house at 119 Oxford St. in Cambridge. There, MacGraw’s character utters the famous words, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The American Film Institute voted the line as the #13 greatest movie quote of all time. MacGraw later called it “a crock” and O’Neal said, “You better say you’re sorry.”

The film debuted on Dec. 16, 1970 and smashed box office records.

The Critics

From 1955 to 1975, Erich Segal ran the Boston Marathon. After Love Story, a spectator shouted at him, “Hey Segal, You run better than you write.”

“The banality of Love Story makes Peyton Place look like Swann’s Way as it skips from cliche to cliche with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,” wrote Newsweek.

Love Story was nominated for the National Book Award, but the fiction judges threatened to walk out unless it was withdrawn. It was.

William Styron called it a “banal book which simply doesn’t qualify as literature.”

New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it “almost unreadable.” He loved the film, though.

“What can you say about a movie about a 25-year-old girl who died?”’ wrote Canby. “That it is beautiful. And romantic…That it looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.”

Little Richard

John Simon panned Love Story the film in the National Review, and then attacked Segal to his face on the Dick Cavett Show.

Segal compared himself to the Greek playwright Euripedes, loved by the people but hated by the critics. Simon retorted Segal could choose to be a knave or a fool. “You chose the latter, deluded by your own lack of talent,” Simon said.

Another guest, Little Richard, famously ended the debate by screaming at Simon “Shut up!”

Not Scholarly Enough

Unlike Little Richard, Segal could not silence his critics.

For the next decade or so, he continued to seek the limelight. Nothing came close to the success he had with Love Story. He worked as a sportscaster for the 1972 Olympics, wrote more novels, taught at various colleges and edited books about such classic authors as Aristophanes, Menander and Plautus. In a 1970 interview with film critic Roger Ebert he bragged about dating a Playboy model.

Questions arose, though, about the seriousness of his scholarship.

“Suddenly the professor who wrote Love Story found his students and fellow academics questioning his seriousness of purpose,” wrote Linda Pelzner in The Professor Who Wrote Love Story.

Old campus of Yale University

“They were hostile, they were deprecating, they were implying–and sometimes saying explicitly–that I had vulgarized myself, or that in fact I was always vulgar,” Segal told Wendy Smith of the Chicago Tribune.

Segal protested he’d always been an academic. “It’s the most important thing I do.”

For a while, he devoted himself exclusively to academics. It didn’t work. He eventually admitted the doubts of others undermined his confidence.

His colleagues suggested he take a leave of absence from his teaching job at Yale. He did. Never again would academics be his full-time profession. He taught as an adjunct or a visitor.

The End

In 1974, Segal met Karen James, a British children’s book editor. They married a year later and had two daughters, Francesca and Miranda. They lived in London.

When he was in his 40s, Erich Segal contracted Parkinson’s disease. He continued to write and teach. On January 17, 2010, he died of a heart attack.

With thanks to Erich Segal: A Critical Companion by Linda Claycomb Pelzer, ‎Linda De Roche.

Images: Erich Segal By Karen Segal – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18038980. Yellow Submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16104951. Dunster House By Margaret Maloney – Mdmalon at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2473300. Love Story May be found at the following website: http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=erich-segal-yellow-submarine., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33459577. Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Ashton Valve Company Saves Lives

The Ashton Valve company was born out of Henry G. Ashton’s desire to make boiler rooms a safer working environment.

In its 100-plus year history, the Ashton Valve company saved countless lives by producing safety and relief valves, gauges of all types, testing equipment, whistles, clocks and other steam-related products for railroads, marine ships and power stations.

Boiler Explosions

During the late 1800s people were dying at an alarming rate from boiler explosions.

In one year in the mid 1860s more than 1,000 people died due to boiler explosions, and even more were injured. In April of 1865, the paddle steamer Sultana, carrying Union prisoners back north from Confederate prison camps, exploded. More than 1,500 people died in the disaster.

The Sultana disaster, illustration in Harper’s Weekly.

Another explosion in July of 1894 at a lumber mill caused the death of four workers and did substantial damage to the mill. The pressure was probably over 500 pounds per square inch when the boiler exploded. The boiler ripped through the roof of the power house and flew through the air for 1,200 feet, passing over the mill and a number of houses at 80 feet in the air. Then it crashed into a nearby wood, levelling many trees and snapping one tree 28 inches in diameter.

Between 1885 and 1895, there were an average of 200 boiler explosions a year in the United States. In the following decade, there were 3,216 explosions, resulting in 7,600 deaths and countless injuries.

Ashton Valve Founded

Henry Ashton arrived in Boston in 1869 from East Dereham, England, with his wife, Emma, and his infant son, Albert. He had a basic education supplemented by a course in mechanical and steam engineering.

Henry Ashton

He worked for Hinkley Locomotive Works and the Eagle Sugar Refinery before inventing his lock pop safety valve in 1871. It was a breakthrough in boiler safety. Basically, the safety valve would close quickly after “popping,” saving a lot of steam. The boiler would then be able to get up to steam much quicker. Time is money, as they say.

Ad for an Ashton “pop” valve and steam gauge

Henry patented his idea and in 1872 started producing the valves with three other employees at 138 Pearl St. Burned out by the great Boston Fire of 1872, the company relocated to other Boston addresses until settling down at 271 Franklin St., its home for the next 27 years.

271 Franklin Street, Boston

The demand for its products grew. In 1885, the Railway Purchasing Agent journal quoted the company as stating “Ashton Valve has not discharged a man on account of any falling off in orders, nor run less than 10 hours a day during the last four years.”

Pressure Gauges

1892 was an important year for Ashton Valve, as it purchased the Boston Steam Gauge Co. and entered the pressure gauge market.

Ashton Valve steam gauge

“The reputation gained by nearly 20 years experience in the manufacture of safety valves and the widely recognized quality of the Ashton Valve company will be the only guarantee needed for the unsurpassed quality of the goods we shall put upon the market,” the company announced.

Before long, the company’s gauges commanded as much respect throughout the industry as its valves. The business continued to grow at a rapid pace with a reputation based on quality products. Its motto, “higher in first cost, but cheaper in the end.”

Death of the Founder

In 1895, the company was saddened by the death of its founder, Henry Ashton. His son, Albert, who had attended MIT, would play an important role in the daily operations of the company for the next 27 years.

Ashton Valve Company building in East Cambridge.

Despite adding a fifth floor to the Franklin Street facility in 1900, the company could not keep up with demand. So in 1907 Ashton Valve purchased a dirt lot in East Cambridge. It then contracted the Densmore and LeClear company to design a four-story, 45,820 sq. ft. building. Located at 161 First St., the building still stands today. It cost $67,000 in 1907 money for C.A. Dodge & Company to build, and it featured modern bathrooms and electricity throughout.

By 1922 Ashton Valve employed 250 workers. 1922 also saw the death of Albert Ashton, who had been running the company since his father’s death in 1895. The 1920s and 1930s represented the peak years for the company. And the profits were good. In 1916, it showed a profit of $182,234, and in 1919 $214,178–in the millions by today’s dollars.

Ashton Valve did make bubblers.

Then business slowed in the 1940s as diesel locomotives, the rise in gasoline usage and electricity as a power source quickly replaced steam. The steam era was coming to a close and the company suffered because it never ventured far from its steam-related products.

World War II

World War II brought major changes to the company and for the first time since 1871 it ceased to be a family-run business. In 1942 the Defense Plant Corporation bought the facility. The government set up the Defense Plant Corporation (DPC) in 1940 to finance the construction of new industrial facilities and the expansion of existing ones. From its creation on Aug. 22,1940 until June 30,1945 , DPC invested over $7 billion to increase the industrial capacity of the United States.

The No. 3 pop safety valve

A letter from the Ashton management to the shareholders explains how the DPC would affect Ashton Valve. Basically, the DPC would purchase the Ashton Valve factory and Ashton Valve would then merge with another valve producer, Crosby Valve. Crosby Valve would run the two companies at the Ashton facility.

Crosby/Ashton produced safety valves and relief valves for navy ships for the duration of the war. The safety valves used by the government ship builders were most likely the same valves Ashton had been selling to them since 1872. Then Ashton Valve had received government approval for the valve’s usage on military vessels. The valve design had not changed much since then.

An Ashton relief valve

After the war ended in 1945, Ashton and Crosby were both purchased by Dewey David Stone, a businessman who owned multiple companies including Converse Rubber. Both companies moved to Wrentham, Mass., in 1948. They occupied the old Winter Brothers tap and die factory. They continued to produce valves under the Crosby/Ashton name and gauges under the Ashton Valve name. The last gauges under the Ashton name were produced in 1978. The Wrentham factory was torn down in 2012.

Lintel over the old Ashton Valve building. Image courtesy Google maps.

Today the company is known more for its beautiful gauges that demand a high price on eBay than for its life saving safety valves. If you happen to be driving down First Street in Cambridge you can see the granite lintel on the building. It proudly states, “Ashton Valve 1907.”

End Note About the Author

Rick Ashton, the author of this story, has retired and lives on an island off the coast of Maine. “I am currently continuing my research on my ancestors and the Ashton Valve company they created, as well as enjoying reading and listening to music,” he said. “Probably the most enjoyable part of researching the company is the wonderful people I have met along the way. Their encouragement and help has made it a great experience. I do not miss work.”

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Seven Fun Facts About E.E. Cummings

Many school kids have a special affinity for e.e. cummings, who wrote about the circus and got away with funky punctuation, made-up words and no capitalization in his poetry. Young ladies, too, are drawn to his lyrical love poems, some of the best in the English language.

He loved to mangle that language like the cartoon character Krazy Kat. He even wrote an introduction to the first collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips.

E.E. Cummings. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Yet Cummings’ experimental poems weren’t just kid stuff.

When he died in 1962, critics acknowledged him as an important 20^th century poet. “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader,” wrote critic Randall Jarrell.

E.E. Cummings

He was born into a prosperous, intellectual Unitarian family in Cambridge, Mass. Like another New England poet, Robert Frost, he had a farm in New Hampshire. Throughout his life he found refuge at Joy Farm in Madison, near Mount Chocorua.

He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard, signed up to drive an ambulance during World War I and then wrote a critically acclaimed novel.

In 1923 his first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, came out. He wrote more books of poetry in the 20s that established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. Over his lifetime he also wrote 2,900 poems, four plays, two novels and essays. He also painted and drew.

For most of his life he lived in a small apartment at 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place … meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.”

He had two short marriages as a young man, then fell in love with a model, Marion Morehouse. They lived together for 30 years, until his death.

He died on Sept. 3, 1962 and is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.

Here are seven fun facts about e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, if you prefer. He used both.

1. Cambridge Roots

His childhood home in Cambridge at 104 Irving Street was across the street from the house Julia Child would later live in. Cummings’ home was the first in Cambridge to have a telephone (a hand-cranked version, that is).

The E.E. Cummings house in Cambridge

He was born Edward Estlin Cummings, named after his father, on Oct. 14, 1894. Everyone called him Estlin. His loving, well-to-do family encouraged his creativity as a child and supported him financially as an adult. He had a happy childhood, capturing its essence in his most famous poem, [in Just-].

When the world is puddle-wonderful

The little lame baloon-man whistles

Far and wee,

And Betty and Is’bel come dancing…

And the goat-footed baloon-man

Whistles

Far

And

Wee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, two Fireside poets, had also lived in the city and died within a decade of Cummings’ birth. Before TV and radio, people read poetry for entertainment in family settings – hence “fireside.” – and schoolchildren memorized poems in school.

Poets were celebrities, rock stars even, back then. Estlin Cummings wanted to be one from his early childhood.

2. He had a beloved African-American teacher

He attended the Agassiz School, a public school run by Maria Baldwin, the African American principal and early civil rights leader. The school now bears her name. About Baldwin, he wrote, “From her I marvelingly learned that the truest power is gentleness.” She called him a most loveable little boy.

As a boy, E.E. Cummings wrote a poem every day. His trademark: no space after a comma, began at the age of 14.

His first published poem appeared in 1910 in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine by the city’s high school students. The last line, about the retirement of his teacher, read,

“Than that which fits you best–our faithful friend.” But the printer left off ‘you.’ From then on, Cummings had an inordinate distrust of typesetters. “Later in his life he would become the bane of printers, insisting on galley after galley that he would examine with extreme care, correcting the most minute mistakes,” wrote his biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.

3. He spent time in a French military prison

E.E. Cummings spent 3-1/2 months in a French military prison. He had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. A bureaucratic mix-up left him in Paris for five weeks, and he fell in love with a French prostitute.

E.E. Cummings in 1917

Cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, wrote letters home that included comments opposing the war. The French military arrested him in 1917 and incarcerated him in a large room. His father protested vigorously and got him out of prison.

From that experience he wrote a novel, The Enormous Room, published in 1922, to critical acclaim.

4. He had Daddy issues

His father worked as the pastor of the South Congregational Church and as a lecturer at Harvard. He also served as secretary of the Boston Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Penal Aspects of Drunkenness and a supporter of the Watch and Ward Society.

His father was a large, powerful man, athletic and aggressive. Estlin, on the other hand, was small, uncoordinated and as a teenager had bad acne. His father often said, “I’d never give a penny to a son of mine who drank.” Estlin drank, but he got more than a penny over the years.

His daddy issues caused him to start rebelling against his father while at Harvard. He drank whiskey sours, visited burlesque shows and wrote erotic love poems. Once he parked his father’s car in front of a bordello.

5. Cummings was a Republican

Though he wrote avant-garde poetry and lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, he registered as a Republican and supported the anti-Communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Patchin Place in Greenwich Village

He visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and criticized the poverty and squalor under Stalin. Susan Cheever wrote, “He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism…” He hated the Kennedys and refused an invitation to the White House from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

6. Estranged from Daughter

His first wife, Elaine Orr, abducted their daughter and he didn’t see her for more than 20 years. Cummings had an affair with Elaine while she was married to Scofield Thayer. She had Cummings’ child, Nancy, in 1919, but her husband was okay with it. Thayer gave Nancy his name and supported her.

Elaine divorced Thayer to marry Cummings in 1924. They stayed together all of two months and divorced after nine.

Elaine told Nancy that Thayer was her father, that he was dead (he wasn’t), that he was crazy (he was).

Elaine shuttled Nancy across the Atlantic and around Europe, putting her in the care of nurses, governesses and boarding schools. Nancy on her own she discovered the poetry of E.E. Cummings. During World War II she worked in Washington, D.C., as a typist and a linguist, and met and married Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson.

Joy Farm n New Hampshire

Nancy’s mother-in-law invited her to stay during the summer at her summer home near Mount Chocorua. Cummings, nearby at Joy Farm, invited her for tea but didn’t disclose their relationship. She agreed to meet him again in Greenwich Village to have her portrait painted, and felt herself falling in love with him. Finally he told her the truth.

7. Dirty Dancing

He admitted his addiction to striptease and burlesque while delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. When living in Greenwich Village he frequented the burlesque show at Minsky’s National Winter Garden to see his favorite stripper, Cleo. As a Harvard undergraduate, he went to the burlesque show at the Old Howard Theater in Boston’s Scollay Square. In Paris, he dated a prostitute named Marie-Louise. He wrote articles for Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 defending burlesque as “art which is alive.”

Drawing of a dancer at Minsky’s

We relied on several fine biographies of E.E. Cummings, including E.E. Cummings A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno; E.E. Cummings By Catherine Reef; Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings By Richard S. Kennedy; e.e. cummings: a life by Susan Cheever.

Image: e.e. cummings house in Cambridge By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22922253. This story was updated in 2021.

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