“In my Aunt Martha’s day, to grow up in Gravesend {N.H.} was to understand that Boston was a city of sin. And even though my mother had stayed in a highly approved and chaperoned women’s residential hotel, she had managed to have ‘fling,’’ as Aunt Martha called it, with {a) man she’d met on the Boston & Maine {Railroad}.’’

— From the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), by John Irving (born in 1942 in Exeter, N.H.)