In Neighbors of Yesterday Foster uses the dramatic monologue with effects that are startling for the time and resonate for another audience generations later. Contemporary reviewers compared her work favorably with Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters, and her sense of the American experience rivals these poets. Among those who praised her Adirondack tales were Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and John Butler Yeats, the poet's father. Although many of her speakers are men, they communicate through the vessel of female awarenessdasheither through their atypical understanding, as in Flint, or through the antithesis of such understanding in Ben Enoch's Fools. Her work will speak across the span of nearly a hundred years and show how human nature and the Adirondacks have not changed that much in a century.
Out of print since 1963, Neighbors of Yesterday is reissued here with a new introduction by her biographer, Richard Londraville.
