Van Wyck Brooks

Honesty and guilt

Boston Common in 1768.

“The Yankee mind was quick and sharp, but mainly it was singularly honest.’’

— Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), historian and critic, in The Flowering of New England

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“The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn’t; it just stops you from enjoying. it .’’

— Cleveland Amory (1917-1998), writer and animal-rights advocate. He came from a Boston Brahmin family.

Going their own ways

In the Litchfield Hills: Bridgewater, Conn. — houses, farms and fields, as seen from Brookfield

— Photo by Liam E

“The Yankee mind was quick and sharp, but mainly it was singularly honest.’’

— Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), once-famous historian, biographer and literary critic, in The Flowering of New England

He spent much of his life in Bridgewater, Conn., long a weekend and summer place for affluent New Yorkers

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“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’’

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), world-renown essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet. He spent most of his life in what we now call Greater Boston.