Louise Dickinson Rich

Writer known for fiction and non-fiction works about New England, particularly Massachusetts and Maine. Mrs. Rich grew up in Bridgewater where her father was the editor of a weekly newspaper. She met Ralph Eugene Rich, a Chicago businessman, on a Maine canoe trip in 1933 and they married a year later. Mr. Rich died in 1944. Her best-known work was her first book, the autobiographical We Took to the Woods, (1942) set in the 1930s when she and husband Ralph, and her friend and hired help Gerrish, lived in a remote cabin near Lake Umbagog. It was described as "a witty account of a Thoreau-like existence in a wilderness home

“There is nothing that I so greatly admire as purposefulness. I have an enormous respect for people who know exactly what they are doing and where they are going. Such people are compact and integrated. They have clear edges. They give an impression of invulnerability and balance, and I wish I were one of them.”