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Six New England Places That Appear in a Novel

Practically any place in New England could become a novel, given the region’s strong literary tradition and distinctive landscape.

Good writers tell the truth about their time and place, whether their fiction is set in colonial Rhode Island or postwar suburban Connecticut.

We’ve therefore chosen six works of fiction set in New England that illuminate a reality about their time and their place. If you know of any other novels or plays with a fictional setting in New England, please share them in the comments section.

A 50s Novel Set in Westport, Conn.

Westport today, the fictional setting for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

In 1955, Sloan Wilson wrote the book of the year about a World War II veteran living with his family in Westport, Conn. Largely autobiographical, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit tells the story of Tom Rath. He struggles with flashbacks of war, the pressures to conform and the financial demands of supporting a stay-at-home mom, their three children and an illegitimate son from a wartime romance in Italy.

New Englanders who lived in postwar suburbia would easily recognize the fictional setting within the very real suburb.

The Raths lived in a little house on Greentree Ave. (not a real street), almost precisely like the houses on all sides of it. They bought it in 1946, and they hated it seven years later. Like the other families on the street, they had small children and planned to move to a larger house as soon as they could afford it.

Tom paces the station platform while waiting for the commuter train to New York, drives the Merritt Parkway and buys a sick child a stuffed animal at the drug store on the way home from work.

Prosperity came to Tom Rath as it did to Westport. He gets a better job and moves into a bigger house. Westport ranks as the 22nd wealthiest place in the United States, home to such celebrities as Martha Stewart, Harvey Weinstein and the late Paul Newman.

Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones starred in the 1956 movie of the same name, also shot in Westport, Conn., and New York City.

Skowhegan and Waterville, Maine Mill Towns

Waterville, Maine, a fictional setting for the Empire Falls miniseries.

Richard Russo placed his novel Empire Falls in the fictional setting of a dying Maine mill town called Empire Falls. Sadly, Empire Falls describes many Maine (and New England) towns that lost their mills and factories along with their prosperity.

The novel, which won the Pulitzer Price in 2002, tells the story of Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill diner.

Miles struggles with the rich family that owns the town, and to a large extent, his life. Empire Falls has memorable characters like his rascally father, his mother-in-law with a big heart and the nasty fitness center owner who lives with his wife.

In 2005, HBO produced a mini-series based on the novel. Russo suggested filming Skowhegan and Waterville as represent Empire Falls. A pizza parlor changed into a diner during filming of the mini-series and called itself the Empire Grill. It closed after six years. A Thai restaurant later opened in the space.

The Classic New Bedford, Mass., Novel

New Bedford, the real, not fictional setting for Moby Dick

The fortunes of Moby Dick rose over the years as those of New Bedford, Mass., fell. The classic novel about whaling and obsession took place when New Bedford enjoyed enormous prosperity – but it ruined Herman Melville’s literary career.

Though Moby Dick sold only 3,200 copies in Melville’s lifetime, critics revived it in the 20^th century as a masterpiece. New Bedford, on the other hand, declined along with the whaling industry. But large swathes of the city still look as they did when Melville signed on to the whaling vessel Acushnet in 1840.

Melville didn’t create a fictional setting for New Bedford when he wrote Moby Dick in 1851. Instead, he described the very real city, with luxurious homes and gardens: He wrote, ‘nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.’

You can still see the Quaker ship owners’ mansions, the Seamen’s Bethel and the neighborhood of the African-American church that Ishmael saw in New Bedford. The New Bedford Whaling Museum devotes ample resources to Melville in the city, including scholar-led walking tours and a 25-hour Moby Dick marathon.

‘Our’ Peterborough, N.H.

Grover’s Corners was the fictional setting inspired by Peterborough, N.H.

There’s no question that the Grover’s Corners of the three-act play Our Town was based on Peterborough, N.H. The town proclaims itself ‘Our Town’ on its entry sign. In 2013, Peterborough officially dedicated the intersection of Grove and Main Streets as “Grover’s Corners, N.H. ” The ceremony commemorated the 75^th anniversary of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play and the 275^th anniversary of the town itself.

Wilder wrote much of the play while staying nearby at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. The three-act play, written in 1938, tells the story of the lives and deaths of ordinary people in small-town America from 1901 to 1913.

The play requires no scenery and few props. The actors mime actions and create Grover’s Corners’ settings with chairs, tables and ladders. In the final act, a key character explains: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”

Wilder, who called Our Town his favorite play, said it should be performed ‘simply, dryly and sincerely.’

Peterborough, tucked in New Hampshire’s quiet southwest corner, retains the small-town feel that inspired Wilder 80 years ago.

The Horror of 140 Prospect St., Providence

The fictional setting for the Ward house was based on the Halsey house in Providence.

In 1925, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft received a letter from his aunt telling him a story about the haunted mansion at 140 Prospect Street in Providence. A Col. Thomas Lloyd Halsey built the house in 1801, and Lovecraft called it ‘a magnificent old mansion.’

Lovecraft researched Providence in colonial times and came up with the story of Charles Dexter Ward. He was a prominent Rhode Islander who disappeared from an insane asylum. His doctor learns Ward was looking for the grave of his ancestor, a shipping magnate and serial killer. Documents in the Ward/Halsey house take the doctor to Ward’s murderer — the ancestor who returned from the dead.

Lovecraft himself didn’t think much of the short novel he called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. A New York Times reviewer liked it, howevert. He called it ‘a good story in the New England witchcraft tradition’ that included alchemy and vampirism.

Lovecraft loved his hometown of Providence, and the city returns the favor today. You can take a walking tour of Lovecraft’s College Hill, and you can follow a guide here to Lovecraftian sites in Providence.

Barre, Vt.

‘Granitetown,’ the fictional setting inspired by Barre, Vt., and its quarries

Like Lesser Gods, written by Mari Tomasi in 1949, describes the difficulty Italian immigrant families had in assimilating to life in the Vermont city of Barre.

Tomasi called Barre ‘Granitetown’ after the quarries that employed the immigrant men. The novel, set in 1924 and 1941, describes how families watch as the granite dust kills their men.

Tomasi, whose family emigrated from Italy, grew up listening to the chatter of stonecutters behind her parents’ grocery store counter. She began working on Like Lesser Gods in the early 1940s. She was then interviewing granite workers and their families for the Federal Writers’ Project in Vermont.

In her story, the character Maria wants her husband to stop working in the dangerous closed sheds of Barre and start a grocery store. He refuses, so she takes a midnight trip to a closed shed. There, she ruins a cross he is carving in the hopes it will force him to quit.

Barre still calls itself the Granite Center of the World. Shortly after the War of 1812, huge granite deposits were discovered. Then the railroad arrived and the city boomed, attracting large numbers of immigrants from Italy, Scotland, Spain and elsewhere.

Images: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (book) By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48911599; Empire Falls (book) By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8843432; Our Town (book) By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19869655’ Like Lesser Gods (book) By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55513607; New Bedford By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4364093; Westport By WestportWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20318963; Waterville By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34160755.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett

Clara Lovering eloped with 17-year-old Herman Webster Mudgett before a New Hampshire justice of the peace in 1878. She didn’t expect him to abandon her and the son born two years later.

Clara Lovering Mudgett

Nor did she realize until later that she was lucky to escape the marriage alive.

Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. H.H. Holmes, lured victims into an elaborate ‘murder castle’ during the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. He may have killed as many as 200 people, though he admitted to only 27. He also ran elaborate life insurance scams, which led to his arrest and conviction.

Clara Lovering was a beautiful young woman from a prominent family in Loudon, N.H. It wasn’t until he was caught in Boston 16 years later that she learned the truth about the man she loved.

H.W. Mudgett

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, N.H., on May 16, 1861, a month after the Civil War broke out. His parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, were devout Methodists and strict disciplinarians. Levi, a farmer and a violent alcoholic, beat his children and locked them in the attic when they misbehaved.

Herman Mudgett

Herman was a mama’s boy who spent a lot of time reading Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also liked to invent things.

Young Mudgett stood out at school, Gilmanton Academy, as a small, odd and unusually bright boy. On his way to school he had to pass the office of a village doctor who left his door unlocked.

Mudgett’s schoolmates found out he was afraid of the doctor’s office and dragged him to it, he later claimed ‘struggling and shrieking.’ They brought him face-to-face with a grinning skeleton.

“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health, but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession,” Mudgett claimed — from his prison cell.

Gilmanton Academy

More likely, wrote Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City, ‘far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.’

Trouble seemed to follow him even as a boy. His only friend died from a fall when they were playing alone in an abandoned building. And he developed a hobby of dissecting animals.

Clara

Herman Mudgett developed courtly manners, a dapper wardrobe and a winning way with women. He graduated high school at 16, and got a job as a teacher in Alton, N.H. There he met Clara Lovering, whose father represented the district in the New Hampshire state Legislature.

Clara was intensely attracted to Herman, but bothered by his insistence on sex. After courting for more than a year, they eloped on July 4, 1878.

She gave birth to their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, in 1880 in Loudon, N.H. By then Herman Mudgett tired of teaching and went to work as a clerk in a Concord, N.H., grocery store. For a year he lived in Concord while his wife lived with his parents in Gilmanton. He decided he wanted to be a doctor. Clara agreed to support Herman through medical school.

Gilmanton, N.H., in 1910.

He enrolled in the University of Vermont‘s medicine program in Burlington, frequently visiting his young family. Clara supported him ‘doing services to various people’ (probably sewing), according to newspaper reports.

After a year Herman Mudgett transferred to the University of Michigan, a medical school that emphasized dissection. She joined him in Ann Arbor, but after a year they decided she’d be better off at home in New Hampshire.

His Michigan professors recalled him as a roue who breached his promise with a widow from St. Louis. He stole cadavers, mutilated them and tried to collect insurance money by saying they died in an accident.

During the summer of his junior year he took a job as a traveling salesman for a book publisher in Northwestern Illinois. He kept the proceeds and fell in love with Chicago.

Life After Medical School

Herman Mudgett graduated in 1884 and set out to find a place to practice. He tried Portland, Maine, where he got another sales job. In his travels he discovered Mooers Forks, N.Y., where he was hired as a grade school principal. He corresponded with Clara by mail, and he visited her several times. He contributed little to support his family.

In Mooers Forks, he was rumored to have caused the disappearance of a boy seen in his company. He also plotted – but didn’t execute – an elaborate life insurance fraud involving a cadaver.

In October of 1888, he visited Clara and Robert at home and told them he had business in Chicago. He didn’t want her to join him. That may be because he had already married another woman. Clara took him to the train station in Concord, and didn’t see or hear from him again for six years.

Clara decided she would have to support herself and her young son. She learned dressmaking in Concord, then set up a successful shop in Tilton.

“There is a modest little tin sign tacked on a simple white building on Main st. opposite the hotel, right in the center of this seminary village, which reads, “Mrs. C.A. Mudgett, Dressmaking,” reported the Boston Globe. She lived in an apartment above the store with her son.

Torture Chamber

Meanwhile, Herman Mudgett was working insurance scams around the country. According to the Boston Globe, “On one occasion Holmes insured his own life for $20,000. Then he went to a hotel in Rhode Island, wearing a beard. He got a body, took it two miles from the hotel, cut the head off, and buried the rest. He shaved, went to the hotel, registered under a new name and asked for Holmes. They said he had gone out, but was staying at the hotel. The swindler took the head, charred it in the hotel furnace and tried to identify it as his own. This particular scheme fell through.”

Mudgett’s torture chamber, or “castle,” in Chicago

Mudgett moved to Chicago and began calling himself Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. He bought a pharmacy, and the owner mysteriously disappeared. Across the street he built a three-story building with living quarters, torture chambers, trapdoors and chutes into the basement kiln. During the Columbian Exposition he opened his home as a hotel for unlucky visitors to the fair. He seduced his female guests, swindled them, killed them and burned their remains.

He also married a third women without divorcing Clara or his second wife.

Mudgett was finally jailed in St. Louis for selling mortgaged goods. He brought a fellow inmate in on one of his schemes. When Mudgett failed to deliver, the inmate tipped off authorities.

Returned Wanderer

In early October 1894, Clara Mudgett got a typewritten letter that her husband sent to his brother in Jamaica Plain from Indianapolis. He explained he was in a train wreck that fractured his skull, then confined in a Minneapolis hospital where he completely forgot who he was. He gradually came to his senses and worked so he could earn enough to come home, set up a business and support his wife and child.

Clara wrote to him, and he responded he was leaving Chicago for Tilton via Montreal. He then sent her a letter from Montreal where he said he was detained on business.

Mudgett was actually hiding out in Burlington, renting a house with the wife of an accomplice he had murdered. He tried to kill her by planting a bottle of nitroglycerine in the basement and asking her to bring it to him. She wisely refused.

One day he went to pick up his mail in Burlington and saw Pinkerton detectives in the post office. He quickly disappeared.

Homecoming

At noon on Monday, Nov. 5, 1894, Herman Mudgett arrived in Tilton by train and found out where Clara and 14-year-old Robert were living. ‘The home-coming was a joyous one for the wife,’ reported the Globe. “The wife hugged and kissed the returned wanderer, wept over his narrow escape from death and long illness, desiring no further explanation of his absence, satisfied with his being home at last and for always, for he had told her so.”

They had a festive family dinner, and then he went to visit his parents in Gilmanton for a few days. He returned to Tilton for about a week, then said he had business in Boston. But Pinkerton detectives were on his trail, and arrested him on Saturday, November 17.

A Boston Globe reporter came to Clara’s house and asked her about her married life. She told him, then asked why. When the reporter told her of her husband’s arrest, she burst into tears and said, “Perhaps he has another wife, too, somewhere.”

Moyamensing Prison. The execution of H. H. Holmes, scene while he was making his final address. Sketched in the Prison by Newmar, Times artist. From Holmes’ Own Story (1895) by Mudgett, Herman W. https://archive.org/details/HolmesOwnStory1895

Mudgett was tried for murder in Philadelphia and hanged on May 7, 1896. Robert became a certified public accountant and city manager of Orlando, Fla.

At the age of 46, Clara Lovering married John Peverly and moved to Vallejo, Calif. She lived to be 95 years old, dying on March 9, 1956. She is buried in Canterbury, N.H.

This story was updated in 2023.

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