Gloucester's Bargain with the Sea. The Bountiful Maritime Culture of Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Whales's Jaw Publishing
Publisher Place: Gloucester,Mass
Publisher Year: 2007
Edition: First Edition

Description: 278 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in As new condition throughout.

Publishers Description: Gloucester has throughout four centuries cast its lot with the North Atlantic, remaining a maritime port for better or worse. And, as Chester Brigham contends in Gloucester s Bargain with the Sea, that stubborn persistence has shaped a very special culture on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The maritime culture of Cape Ann is the mix of a noble maritime heritage; ubiquitous sea influences that reach as far as the quarries behind Rockport and into the haunted tracks of Dogtown Common; seductive but capricious natural splendors; and untidy independence that repels some but converts other visitors into lifetime devotees. "Gloucesters Bargain with the Sea" portrays these contrasting elements in the makeup of Gloucester plus Rockport, Essex and Manchester-by-the-Sea and the wealth of painting sculpture, music, decorative arts, poetry, fiction and narrative prose that the mix has somehow produced, bursting forth from every seam of this very different Massachusetts cape. Here are the innocently revealing journals of Gloucester deep-sea skippers; the efforts of Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot and Charles Olson to come to terms with maritime Gloucester in fiction and poetry; the artistic epiphanies experienced individually by Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, John Sloan and Edward Hopper when painting Gloucester; the coastal granite quarrying that drew sculptors Charles Grafly, Paul Manship, Walker Hancock; the haunted sea-facing uplands of Dogtown Common that inspired playwrights and novelists and the tortured landscapes of Marsden Hartley. Gloucester, from its merchant trading days, through its era as center of schooner fishing, on down to its present as a multi-activity port, has been home to authentic humanity and idiosyncratic, significant creativity. Gloucester s Bargain with the Sea is a profile of that culture and its people at the edge of, and deeply influenced by, the sea.

ISBN: 9780974077857