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Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle Paperback – September 1, 1991
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Tinged with nostalgia and disenchantment, the book describes a Provincetown that has changed, a place on the verge of modernity. It is no longer a major fishing port. It has become a place whose business is tourism. Contrasting the old and the new, Vorse celebrates the enduring character of the town itself. She tells stories that are engaging and charming, droll and fabulous. The wrinkled Mrs. Mary Mooncusser who, though drunk and stark naked, conducts herself with great decorum when Vorse pays her a call, might have stepped out of the pages of Sherwood Anderson or Eudora Welty. In another anecdote, the townspeople scour the beaches for cases of booze dumped into the sea by rumrunners and are briefly inflated with the spirit of ancestral smugglers and buccaneers.
Vorse herself remained something of an outsider in Provincetown, despite her evident affection for the place and its inhabitants. They surely regarded her as simply another of those artist-intellectuals--many of whom appear in the pages of this book. The "off-Cape" outsiders put the town in the national limelight but took no interest in local matters. Vorse here ponders local matters exclusively, almost, one suspects, as a way of forgetting the more complex matters that occupied her--her agonies of parental guilt, her resentment of domestic obligations, her third marriage, her depressions and breakdowns. The town is in that sense beyond time.
- Print length372 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRutgers University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1991
- Dimensions5.51 x 0.89 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100813517524
- ISBN-13978-0813517520
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Product details
- Publisher : Rutgers University Press; First Edition (September 1, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 372 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0813517524
- ISBN-13 : 978-0813517520
- Item Weight : 11.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.51 x 0.89 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,474,043 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #812 in New England US Travel Books
- #7,576 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- #46,910 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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The author is passionate about her life, her home, and Provincetown in general. Her descriptions of the town buildings and landmarks are fun to match up with today's Provincetown. Many are the same today as described from the 1940's!
The book had an interesting start. The cover art of the first edition was actually a depiction of "Motif #1" in Rockport, MA. This inflamed an already existing feud between the two towns. Not mentioned in this edition, but it created quite a stir at the time.
Nice read if you want to stroll back in time to "old" New England history.
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