Across decades, Maine has produced nationally-recognized novelists who wrote place-based fiction. From the late nineteenth century to the present, or from Sarah Orne Jewett to Monica Wood, writers have emerged from the Canadian border to the New Hampshire state line and from Down East to the northwest hinterland. They have explored the experiences of living in far-flung settings: island and coastal villages; northwoods lumbering communities; unincorprorated townships; backcountry hamlets; and mill cities and towns. Taken together their body of work composes a remarkable literary map of a diverse and changing Maine. Hidden Places traces the work of these writers to provoke readers into seeing and understanding Maine places with new awareness. These Maine writers construe place as both a territory on the ground and a country of the imagination. They help insiders see more clearly what is distinctive about their communities and encourage outsiders to better understand what might seem quaint or odd about the state. Like a well-drawn atlas, Hidden Places seeks to capture a diverse state at the granular level one representation at a time. It explores the identity of Maine through its writers and the people and places they wrote of.
