Gerald Warner Brace

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He began his career as an instructor and professor of English and of creative writing teaching briefly at Williams College, and later at Dartmouth College and Mount Holyoke College. He has spent most of his teaching career at Boston University where the creative writing program still awards a prize in his name.

It was said of him that as a sailor he was as skilled as any lobsterman who shared Penobscot Bay. Laconic in his ways, he woke early to write, to shape words that spoke his sense of what Maine stood for against the ebbing of old New England.

His college years at Amherst served to confirm his strong and romantic attachment to the traditions of New England. He always looked for the old ways, the remnants of the past in action ... and though he knew life and the world were harsh and often tragic, he had a conviction that old New England had once discovered a classic serenity that could still be perceived.

Brace, like C. P. Snow, greatly admired Anthony Trollope above all of the English novelists and wrote an introduction to The Last Chronicle of Barset. Reviewers of his novel, The Department, inevitably compared him to C. P. Snow. One reviewer called his novel The Department the American equivalent of The Masters, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954, in its witty and basically good-humored anatomy of every English department there ever was.

He was referred to by The New England Quarterly as "the forgotten New England novelist", and he was renowned in his time for his beautifully illustrated chronicles of life along and near the New England coast. A writer, sailor, boat designer, and teacher, he introduced readers to seafaring folk and farmers, townspeople and "summer people," and has made us see them, their lives, and their background.

From his first book through of his succeeding books, it is dominated by scene. He has few equals in New England landscapes and perhaps none in describing her coastline, especially the jagged rock and spruce covered coast of Maine. It was also said of all of his novels that the quality of his "prose style so perfected and shaped that it is difficult to find anywhere a poorly written sentence."

What follows is a brief description of his works.

In his novel, The Garretson Chronicle, depicting three generations of a Massachusetts family, he deals with satirizing the decline of Emersonain New England, and the battle with the mountain (a modern version of Moby Dick). The narrator-hero of the novel is a young boy who has never been content with his job as the village carpenter and is always searching for roots and a sense of accomplishment. This novel was promoted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

The Wayward Pilgrims is a novel about a young university instructor, traveling around the state of Vermont, who meets an older woman, at a train depot, who teaches him about her experiences in life.

The narrator of the novel is Robert "Sandy" Sanderling, a professor of American literature with a degree from Harvard, who is planning his retirement speech. Looking back over his life, he feels that he has accomplished very little and his one novel, Aftermath was not the book he had hoped it would be; his marriage was a disaster; he has no real friends in his department, and the profession of teaching and the field of scholarship have changed and left him behind.

It is also one of the first novels portraying the institutional and personal responses to political influences on college campuses during the 1960s.

He wrote eleven novels and, in addition, literary works such as The Age of the Novel (1957) and The Stuff of Fiction (1969). In 1976 he published his autobiography, Days That Were, which included his own illustrations.

Most of Brace's novels are set in New England. They include:

He was a 1958 National Book Award nominee for fiction. In 1967 he won the Shell Award for Distinguished Writing from Boston University.

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