Description
Adirondack Portraits: A Piece of Time is a moving poetic statement about the Adirondack wilderness and the people who fought the mountains’ relentless environment to settle there at the end of the nineteenth century. The book is also about the remarkable Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1970). Born in poverty in the Adirondacks, as a young woman she emerged in the center of the literary and artistic circles of her day, an associate of Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the Yeatses, father and son. Adirondack Portraits gives us a glimpse into the early life of Jeanne and some of the influences that helped her step from a harsh physical existence into the unforgettable world of New York, Paris, and London in the 1920s. Above all, her poems and prose pieces are, in the words of Alfred Kazin, “an attempt to recover a vanished time, to record with love and admiration and enduring wonder a life of hardship, endless exertion, and perhaps above all, the kind of isolation that used to dominate country life in America.”
About the Author
Noel Riedinger-Johnson spends much of her free time in the Adirondack mountains. She wrote and edited the award-winning documentary film, “The Adirondacks: The Land Nobody Knows.” She is a director of the Adirondack Research Center and served on the New York State Forest Preserve Centennial Planning Committee. Her parents republished Jeanne Foster’s 1916 book, Neighbors of Yesterday, in 1963, which led to Riedinger-Johnson’s friendship with Foster in the last years of her life.
September 1986