Joseph C. Lincoln

Lincoln was born in Brewster on Cape Cod in 1870, the son of a sea captain who died before the boy could remember him. His mother took the family off the Cape to Chelsea, an industrial town outside Boston, and the rest of his working life reads as a long return: more than forty novels and hundreds of stories about the villages, wharves and dry Yankee talk of one small stretch of Massachusetts coast.

He began with light verse — Cape Cod Ballads in 1902 — and found his form with Cap'n Eri two years later. The Saturday Evening Post took his work steadily for decades, and a critic dubbed him the literary dean of Cape Cod, which is how he is still described.

He knew exactly what he was not doing. Naturalism was the serious mode of his generation, and he read Norris and Dreiser and declined to follow them, saying that telling stories which left readers thinking better of their neighbours was work enough for him. Whether that is a limitation or a position is a fair argument.

He prospered, summered at Chatham on a bluff above the Atlantic, and died in Florida in 1944.