Maine is the most isolated slice of the continental United States. It’s a place that stretches so far north it forms a peninsula into Canada, and so far east that it’s where the country comes closest to brushing Europe. And yet Maine’s frigid landscapes and cloistered small towns occupy a conspicuously outsized space in American fiction. The population of the state has hovered just above a relatively minuscule million people for almost 50 years, but in the last two decades its rough shores, tall pines, and one-horse towns have inspired three winners of the Pulitzer Prize: Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2002), Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2009), and Paul Harding’s elegiac novel of loss, Tinkers (2010).
Maine is a place where the wind keens through packed forests. Snow accumulates by the side of the road into mounds as tall as houses. You could go as far back as Henry David Thoreau’s obsessively observed 1864 nature essay The Maine Woods to find crystalline depictions of the state, but really there’s no need. Maine, and its relentless topography, is everywhere in fiction. Think of The Cider House Rules and John Irving’s patients rendering of the map, from inland mountains which slide into unfarmed valleys which give way to “the bright Maine sea”. Atmospheric bestsellers, like Christina Baker Kline’s haunted Orphan Train and Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water, with its misty sea that steamed like a bath. And most notably, Stephen King, the bard of a supernatural Maine in which the impossible feels inevitable.
