Leaving The Outermost House
Beston married writer Elizabeth Coatsworth in 1929, and the couple eventually bought a farmhouse called "Chimney Farm" in Nobleboro, Maine. Beston wrote several more books while living in Maine (Northern Farm and Herbs and the Earth among them), but never again approached the overall quality that he achieved in The Outermost House.
In the 1940s, Beston received honorary doctorates from Bowdoin College, Dartmouth College, and University of Maine and was made honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard. He was also made honorary editor of National Audubon Magazine. In 1949, a twentieth-anniversary edition of The Outermost House was released. Beston also edited an anthology of writings about Maine, White Pine and Blue Water (1950).
Beston lectured regularly at Dartmouth College and wrote for publications like The Atlantic and Christian Science Monitor throughout the 1950s. He also revised his earlier work in children's literature and published Henry Beston's Fairy Tales in 1952. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1954. In 1959, he was the third recipient of the AAAS' Emerson-Thoreau Medal, previously awarded to only Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot.
Beston donated the "Fo'castle" to the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1959. One of its tenants was a woman from Sharon, Massachusetts named Nan Turner Waldron, who would spend several weeks each year there from 1961 to 1977. Her experiences are chronicled in the book Journey to Outermost House.
With his health deteriorating, Beston returned to the beach in Eastham one last time on October 11, 1964, when his famous house was dedicated as a National Literary Landmark. Beston died on April 15, 1968 in Nobleboro, Maine.
The house was carried away by astronomically high tides during a winter hurricane in February 1978. Waldron wrote that thousands still come to the beach each year, wanting to learn more about this man who retreated to the outer beach "in a search for the great truth, and found it in the spirit of man," as his National Literary Landmark dedication plaque read. "Many know the book, some carry it with them," Waldron wrote. "Still they come, pilgrims of a sort- stirred by his sense of wonder but drawn by his vision of hope."
Read more about this topic: Henry Beston
Famous quotes containing the words leaving and/or house:
“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 12:30.