Sarah Orne Jewett: You Must Find your own Quiet Center

It’s the birthday of writer Sarah Orne Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine (1849). Her father was a country doctor, and she thought about becoming a doctor herself. Instead, she turned to writing and had her first story published in The Atlantic when she was just 20 years old. She wrote about the people of Maine and about the old country ways that were quickly dying out around her, and earned a reputation as one of the finest writers in the “local color” tradition. Her first collection of stories, Deephaven, came out in 1877. Her most famous work was the collection The Country of the Pointed Firs, which was published in 1896.

Jewett said, “You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.”