Cape COD Stories by Joseph C Lincoln

Joseph Crosby Lincoln (February 13, 1870 – March 10, 1944) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer who wrote several works set in a romanticized Cape Cod setting. The Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator both published Lincoln's work on a regular basis. Lincoln was aware of modern naturalist writers like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, who utilized American literature to delve into the depths of human nature, but he rejected this literary exercise. Lincoln argued that telling narratives that made readers feel good about themselves and their neighbors was enough for him. Two of his short stories have been adapted for the big screen.

Lincoln was born in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and after his father died, his mother moved the family to Chelsea, Massachusetts, a industrial town outside of Boston. Lincoln's creative career, which focuses on old Cape Cod, can be regarded as an attempt to reclaim an Eden from which he had been driven by personal tragedy. His literary depiction of Cape Cod can also be seen as a pre-modern sanctuary populated by people of old Yankee stock that was provided to readers as an alternative to an America that was rapidly modernizing, urbanizing, immigrating, and industrializing. Lincoln was a Universalist and a Republican.

Lincoln spent his winters in northern New Jersey, near the core of the publishing world in Manhattan, but his summers in Chatham, Massachusetts, after becoming prosperous. He lived near a shingle-style mansion called Crosstrees on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Chatham. Lincoln died at Winter Park, Florida, in 1944, at the age of 73.