Why Is New England So Prominent in Literature?
But Ms. Horan still carries the thin, difficult soil of New England somewhere inside her, and when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd, pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.
- Stephen King, Carrie (1974)
New England has played an outsized role in the genesis of American literature. When the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editors came up with a short tally of noteworthy contributors to American literature, half the people included had been born in New England. Literary critic David Gates reluctantly acknowledges that “American literature, wherever it’s ended up, came straight outta New England.” As journalist Charlotte Canelli summarizes, this is “a region of the country abundant in literary tradition.”
While it is widely recognized that American literature was dominated by New England in its beginnings, we should also note that New Englanders continue to occupy prominent positions in the literary scene. A fair few of them can be encountered among the most accomplished American writers alive today. This point is borne out by easily available data.
Wikipedia provides a handy list of the world’s top-selling fiction authors. If we go through the list, pick out all the living American writers on it, and categorize them by state of birth, we get the following result:
According to this list, then, three of the top thirteen best-selling American authors alive today were born in New England. That is nearly a quarter, or, to be more precise, about 23.08%. In contrast, one source puts the region’s population at 4.53% of the U.S. total in 2023. Based on these numbers, New Englanders are overrepresented among star writers by a factor of slightly more than five.
Other ways of calculating prominence in literature yield similar conclusions. For instance, YouGov provides a rating of “The Most Popular Contemporary Fiction Writers (Q1 2024).” Pick out the top thirteen who are both alive and American, and this is what you find:
There is some overlap with the previous data, but Stephenie Meyer is gone, whereas John Irving and Suzanne Collins have been added. The overrepresentation is stronger this time, with New England natives accounting for four of the thirteen. That is about 30.77%, meaning that they are overrepresented by a factor of almost seven.
One reader suggested I should base my analysis on a tally of best-selling books. I responded that it was generally agreed that New England had historically made an outsize contribution to American letters, and the purpose of looking at these lists was merely to show that the region’s prominence had continued to this day. Therefore, I saw little point in going through the best-selling books of all time. Instead, it might make sense to look at the best-selling books of, say, the twenty-first century. However, I have been unable to find any such list. It seems that all the Internet has to offer in this regard is selections of some of this century’s best-selling books. For instance, this page presents “21 Best Selling Novels of the 21st Century.” By my count, nine of the authors are American-born, and four of those were born in New England.
So why are this region’s inhabitants apparently so prone to becoming highly successful writers? New England’s historic locations may explain part of the phenomenon. Cultural critic Finnegan Schick credits Massachusetts with being a state where one sees “cobblestones as old as the Commonwealth” and “a young writer can […] find himself standing among the ghosts of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James.” Indeed, Canelli notes that “authors’ homes in New England are popular places for vacation and summer driving trips.” H. P. Lovecraft, horror writer extraordinaire and a major influence on Stephen King, was greatly inspired by the architecture in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. Robert Anasi describes this side to Lovecraft’s work, and comments: “No matter where you go on the east side of Providence, you can’t help but slide back through the centuries.”
Still, New England as a whole does not seem to possess many more historical sites than other sections of the country. A 2021 article enumerates the fifty “American Cities With the Highest Concentration of Historic Places.”Of the fifty, sixteen are in New England. However, nine of those are in Massachusetts, three in Vermont, two in Maine, one in Connecticut, and one in Rhode Island. In other words, Massachusetts is strongly overrepresented, Vermont and Maine are less so, and the region’s other states barely show up. Therefore, a supposed abundance of historic locations leaves something to be desired as an explanation of New England’s literary importance.
It could also be argued that there is nothing special about New England as such. The whole East Coast is overrepresented among the heavy-hitters of modern American fiction. Of the thirteen states represented in our sampling of Wikipedia’s list, only four do not belong to the Eastern Seaboard. On the YouGov list, it is only three out of thirteen. However, since the East Coast contains more than a third of the total U.S. population, its collective overrepresentation is weaker than New England’s. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the American east overall has a longer cultural heritage than the west, giving it an advantage in literary matters.
Another possible reason is geography. A coastal environment may be helpful for creative writing. Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols makes the case that water has immense cognitive benefits, arguing that proximity to the liquid can “increase innovation and insight.” It can also induce awe, he maintains. Thus, New England may be an auspicious place for writing due to its coastal location. Yet this explanation fails to account for the West Coast’s poor showing. Of all the names on our two lists, only one, Washington native Debbie Macomber, hails from the West Coast.
Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that New England’s natural environment is deeply attractive to artists. Robert Frost is the most notable example, his poetry being permeated by depictions of the area’s natural beauty. “Though the man was born in California, it’s clear that the poet was born in New England,” remarks Tyler Malone. “In these dense forests and endless forks in the road, Frost found his voice.”
David Gates, moreover, opines that early New England authors developed a feeling “of living in a landscape that would kill you if you didn’t lay in firewood and firearms,” and that this attitude has come to define American culture more broadly. So maybe the region’s writers have an advantage because they are especially richly endowed with a mindframe to which all Americans can relate. Of course, such a theory would be hard to test. Nevertheless, perhaps the geographic thesis is not entirely off the table.
Affluence and education could also be invoked as reasons for New England’s outsize impact. Compared to other areas of the country, New England seems to produce more writers overall, not just more highly successful ones. A 2023 article reveals that three of the ten places where American authors were most commonly born, which included nine states and the District of Columbia, are in New England. They include Connecticut in third place, Massachusetts in fifth, and Rhode Island in eighth. The author, Andrew Van Dam, observes that“the states where writers grow up” generally have populations with “higher incomes and more advanced degrees.” As is typical of such states, “they cluster along the East and West coasts.” But again, it is only the East Coast that seems to be prominent among highly popular writers.
Philosopher Horace Kallen offers an interesting perspective in his 1915 article “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” which has become a classic of cultural pluralist philosophy. Kallen attributes the early American republic’s unity and cultural flourishing to the ethnic homogeneity of its Anglo-Saxon stock. In his opinion, “the preservation and development of any given type of civilization rests upon these two conditions, like-mindedness and self-consciousness” — or, as we might say, a sense of community and a sense of identity. Kallen applies the same framework to the development of American literature, to which New England and the way of writing pioneered there were instrumental: “It took over two hundred years of settled life in one place for the New England school to emerge, and it emerged in a community in which like-mindedness was very strong, and in which the whole ethnic group performed all the tasks, economic and social, which the community required.” In essence, New Englanders excelled in letters because their region was the most homogenously Anglo-Saxon.
Kallen’s explanation is probably the strongest we have seen so far. New England was indeed more ethnically and culturally homogenous than other parts of the country, as Kallen details in his article. Therefore, his view of what caused the region’s literary greatness is less vulnerable to counter-examples than the other options we have considered. As of 2024, the proportion of the population that is of English descent is still higher than the national average in every state in New England. Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are among the top five states with the largest English shares.
Kallen’s thesis also aligns with at least two facts which we have not yet considered. Firstly, judging by their names, all the New England natives on our two lists are Anglo-Saxons. Stephenie Meyer is only a seeming exception, as her maiden name was Morgan. Secondly, it is striking that, after Britain and the United States, most of the people on Wikipedia’s list of top-selling authors are from Japan. At first blush, this is puzzling. But if Kallen’s idea is correct and ethnic and cultural homogeneity is conducive to literary greatness, it makes sense that the Japanese would punch above their weight.
Some caveats should be added in closing. Firstly, we have relied on birthplaces to determine writers’ states of origin. Obviously, this method is problematic. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Massachusetts, but grew up in Virginia. However, looking at birthplaces likely understates rather than overstates New England’s significance in the lives of the United States’ great authors. Numerous great American writers who were not originally from New England did live there at some point, or simply felt a strong bond with the area.
Also, we have not gauged New Englanders’ degree of representation among contemporary nonfiction authors. This is due in part to a lack of comprehensive information. There does not seem to be a tally of the most successful American nonfiction writers. Still, The New York Times’s current best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction books can be used as an unsatisfactory substitute. Three of the top ten works on the list were either authored or co-authored by natives of Massachusetts: Sebastian Junger, Alan Eisenstock, and George Stephanopoulos. No Anglo-Saxon names here, though. But this list is also flawed in that it seems to be dominated by people who can sell books based on their personal celebrity. Three of the top ten volumes were penned by Bill Maher, Darius Rucker, and Whoopi Goldberg, respectively. So, again, it is not a very good measure of excellence in nonfiction.
As we have seen, New Englanders are prominent not only in the history of American letters, but also among current literary figures. In his classic essay, Horace Kallen mused: “For decidedly the older America, whose voice and whose spirit was New England, is gone beyond recall.” Perhaps a trace of it remains.