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[Newspaper Article]
"TIME OUT OF MIND"
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A Saga of Maine As Narrated By Popular Story Writer, Rachel Field
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An inquiry comes from Interlachen, Fla.: "Will you tell in your book column what you know of Rachel Field and her "Time Out of Mind"?
To Macmillan Company we are indebted to much information concern-
[Photograph] [Right corner of photo has a label that reads: FRANK FORRESTALL ADAMS Portland Maine]
RACHEL FIELD author of "Time Out of Mind" ___________________________
ing this gifted writer whom Maine claims although she was born in New York.
Miss Field for many years was known as one of the most popular American story writers for young people of many ages. Her prose stories have always been enjoyed by a double audience. The morals humorously implied in "Eliza and the Elves"; the sedate and sagacious side of "Hitty"; the historic detail of "Calico Bush"; the emotional analysis of "Hepatica Hawks"; the old English background of "Little Dog Tobey"; the New York atmosphere of "Just Across the Street", all these drew praise from adults, while younger readers loved their adventurous pages.
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Her poetry, however, has been more sharply divided. "The Pointed People" was the childrens' own, and "Points East", a kind of story telling in poetry definitely for those at least over fifteen. "Branches Green" struck a new note. It contained poetry written not for the purpose of pleasing young people, and therefore has found for itself a double audience of older children who are appreciative of poetry and adults. Not so long ago Miss Field proved her versatility in the direction of writing, by producing an adult novel, "God's Pocket," as fascinating a piece of biography as has ever come out of the Maine background.
Rachel Field was born in New York. Her family moved to Springfield, Mass., where she attended the public schools, later going to Radcliffe College for special courses in literature and composition. During the last two years there she become a member of Prof. Baker's "47 Workshop," a playwriting course where the students wrote and produced their own plays. That marked the beginning of her play writing career. After that she tried her hand at poetry, "The Pointed People" being the first published venture and everything else followed in due course.
Miss Field says of herself: "From the year I was 15, I have been going each summer to a small beautiful wooded island off the coast of Maine, and I suppose that it, more than any one thing in my life has helped me with my writing. For it means roots and background to me. It creeps into nearly everything I write and l never want to be anywhere else when summer comes around. Many of my verses in 'The Pointed People' were written there; and much of 'Hitty' and all of 'Calico Bush' has that coast of Maine setting."
Miss Field spends her summers in Maine and her winters in New York and Connecticut. Trotty, her dog, is one of her constant, worthy companions.
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Referring to "Time Out of Mind", here is what Miss Field herself has to say:
"In thinking over what I could say of myself and why and how 'Time Out of Mind' came to be written, I was surprised to discover a series of queer paradoxes. I wish I could say that I had been born on a sailing vessel on a voyage round the Horn instead of in a brownstone-front within two blocks of the Grand Central station. I would like to think that my infant eyes saw salt water and the bristling spruces of the Maine cost, but it must be admitted that they peered from a carriage trundled in the brown square of Bryant Park.
"The coast of Maine did not burst upon me till I was 15. I often wonder if that may not be the reason its dark, jugged shores and wooded islands made such lasting impressions on my adolescent emotions.
"The big white houses that prosperous captains and shipbuilders set up to overlook Penobscot Bay and the harbors always stirred me to wonder at the lost era they represented. And so I suppose I was bound some day to do a book about just such a house and the people who lived in it. It must have been more than a dozen years ago that the characters of Kate and Nat and Rissa came into my mind, and they stated there in the back of it all through the time I was trying to write other things, plays which never reached Broadway (a far cry from the coast of Maine!), verse, and later the books for children.
"Ironically enough, I wrote the New York chapters of 'Time Out of Mind' last September under Maine spruces within sound of the sea and the Line Storm beating on the roof, and many of the parts that had most to do with sea and woods were written here in New York, with the clock in the Gas Company's tower telling me the hours. It was no more difficult to write of berries and moss and apples here than there.
"I never went to a ship launching. The echo of hammers on wooden timber has come to me second-hand, through the words of older people whose ears have actually heard them. I cannot boast sea-captain ancestors, yet here I am writing of the passing of those days of prosperity. One never knows how it will be, especially if one happens to be merely a 'poor ignorant author' to borrow a pet phrase from 'Copey' of Harvard."
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In the April 7th New York Herald Tribune "Books" "Time Out of Mind" was reviewed by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, whose "Portrait of an American" and "Lost Paradise" belong to the saga of which he speaks. It is grandly written and if only space permitted entire re-print! Dr. Coffin says, in part:
"It is refreshing to read a book in the year 1935 that leaves one vibrating as one vibrates after reading a saga. It is an event that a sage can happen this late in the form of a novel. Rachel Field's 'Time Out of Mind' is such an event. This story of Maine is full of the ancient literary absolutes. Though we are a young nation, we have been having a feast lately of books built out of our national past which have the primitive and fundamental designs that would look well in an epic.