Maine author Kenneth Roberts died 50 years ago this past July at the age of 71.
As a boy, I read a number of his books, though I knew next to nothing about him as a person. I did know Roberts was a prolific writer of historical fiction and that I enjoyed the stories he told. Historian Henry Steele Commager went further: “Few novelists have done more to re-create the past for us, vividly and authentically”.

I have also discovered, from later readings, that Roberts was a fiercely independent, frequently cranky New Englander. In the first chapter of his 1949 autobiography, I Wanted To Write, he described himself: “I have been accused of hermitcy or recluse-ism because I stay at home and work while others sun on the beach and go to cocktail parties: If that’s being a hermit or recluse, I plead guilty”.

He traveled the world, but Roberts was a proud resident of Maine for most of his life. He grew up listening to his grandmother tell stories about their Arundel relatives (the name was changed to Kennebunkport in 1821) who fought in the American Revolution. When he pressed her for more information about, “the little people, the men who sailed the ships and stopped the bullets,” his grandmother could tell him nothing. His curiosity piqued, Roberts’s life as a historian had begun.

His books have aged remarkably well. Reading them again is like visiting an old friend. Most of Roberts’s novels are about people from coastal Maine, “his other Eden,” a critic called it. As he explained in his autobiography, “I wanted to give the people of Maine an honest, detailed and easily understood account of how their forebears got along.”

Insatiably curious about the lives of his ancestors, he used their experiences as a basis for many of his novels, starting with Arundel, published in 1929. In Northwest Passage, (1936) considered by many to be his greatest novel, he writes about the French and Indian War. In Arundel, Oliver Wiswell and Rabble in Arms his subject is the American Revolution, and The Lively Lady and Captain Caution are about the War of 1812.

Roberts’s autobiography is filled with his own intense opinions. He was a Republican who detested Franklin Roosevelt. It is said that visitors to his house found Roosevelt dimes glued to clamshells he used as ashtrays, the better to grind ashes in FDR’s face! He deplored the deteriorating state of Maine’s highways, “embellished with billboards, sardine tins, old shoe boxes and lunch containers.” When the Maine Turnpike was built, he fought a losing battle against that “august authority.” He had no use for American education: “A mind loaded with little scraps of information on Egyptian history, zoology, oriental art, the poets of the Renaissance and similar intellectual detritus is not trained,” he wrote. “It might be called a human New England attic: A repository of useless and forgotten things.”

Roberts generated controversy all through his life. At Cornell he frequently wrote articles for the college newspaper attacking the school’s administration. Throughout his career as a writer he denounced historians for what he considered to be their deliberate falsification of history. After he met Henry Gross, a retired Maine game warden and amateur water dowser, Roberts spent decades attacking scientists at the Department of the Interior for discrediting “water witching” as water dowsing was called. In Experiments with a Forked Twig, Roberts responded, “Water dowsing isn’t the only manifestation that baffles scientists. They are similarly baffled by the curve ball, saying there is no such thing, whereas anyone who has played baseball knows that this coterie is stupidly, overwhelmingly and idiotically wrong”.

In 1911 Roberts married Anna Mosser from Boston, and she must have been a saint. She typed and re-typed his manuscripts, often in unheated apartments during the winter. Until the success of Northwest Passage in 1936, they had very little money. He called her “patient and long suffering'” and he completely depended on her. “Anna says we can’t spend a penny until we get a check from the Post. All writers should learn to live on spaghetti for months on end. It’s delicious”.

At least Kenneth Roberts had a sense of humor.

“Anna says I ought to have a theme song, so I wrote one for her:

I wonder what’s eating him now:

At what he is raging-and how!

I wonder what’s making him squawk and yell,

Beef and howl and roar like hell.

I wonder what next he’ll rewrite?

All day and through most of the night

I wonder what tripe I will next have to type.

I wonder what’s eating him now!