'The ideal pursuit'

A 17th-Century map depicting New England as a coastal enclave extending from Cape Cod to New France

“History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.’’

— Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), celebrated novelist, short story writer and critic. From 1949 until their divorce, in 1972, she was married to Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning poet from a prominent Boston Brahmin family.