Category Archives: Person

H.P. Lovecraft & Round Mountain: West Brattleboro Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), was an American writer who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of horror and weird fiction. Right: H.P. Lovecraft (right) and friend Arthur Goodenough outside the latter’s home in 1927 on what is now Goodenough Rd. in West Brattleboro. Credit: H.P. Lovecraft Archive Lovecraft frequented the Brattleboro area, and his story “The Whisperer in Darkness” was set in West Brattleboro after the massive flood of 1927. “I’ve never seen no country niftier than the wild hills west of Brattleboro,” Lovecraft wrote to a friend. “The nearness and intimacy of the little domed hills become almost breathtaking. Their steepness and abruptness hold nothing in common with the hum-drum standardized world we […]

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – West Brattleboro Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, beloved 19th century American author and Brattleboro local, began her 50-year literary career in Brattleboro. She published over 250 short stories, 14 novels, and 3 plays. Freeman was quite an original. Strong and independent, she was a shrewd business woman as well as a talented writer. She made a fortune writing of New England life and its characters, many of whom rebelled against societal expectations and constraints. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was internationally known, and America’s most popular woman writer during the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. She was the first recipient of the prestigious William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Fiction in 1926, was among the first three women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1938 was memorialized when the American Academy of Arts and Letters installed bronze doors inscribed, “Dedicated […]

William Czar Bradley II, grandson of the famous jurist and poet from Westminster, was the first library director of Brook Memorial Library, serving from 1884 until about 1904. He was class poet at Harvard University, and he published two books in his time. The Brooks Memorial Library still stands today, but in Bradley’s time it looked very different. The “beautiful and commodious” Victorian-style library Bradley knew stood until the 1960s, when it was demolished and the current structure was built in its place.

Who is Jody Williams? Jody Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for founding and leading the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an unprecedented cooperative effort that brought governments, United Nations bodies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and more than 1000 NGOs in 90 countries together to pass the Ottawa (Mine Ban)Treaty. She lived on Western Avenue and Chapin Street growing up, attended the Green Street School from 1957 to 1962, graduated from Brattleboro High School in 1968, attended the University of Vermont, the School for International Training (SIT) and Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies, and lives in the area today. A brave and straight-talking defender of human rights globally, Williams now studies modern warfare to promote new understanding about security today, especially the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Nobel Women’s Initiative She helped establish the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006 to use the visibility and prestige of […]