Story of Mount Desert Island

This is part tribute to the glories and beauty of a place and part a history of its people - fisherman, sailor, farmer, lumberman, shipwright and quarryman rolled into one, and master of all. Originally conceived as a speech delivered to benefit local libraries, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison developed the text into a book first published in 1960. This revised edition adds historical photographs and commentary by Morison’s daughter, Emily Morison Beck, editor of Sailor Historian , an anthology of Morison’s work, and Gregory M. Pfitzer, an associate professor at Skidmore College and author of Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World . But the text is vintage Morison. His breezy style captures the high points of the island’s glorious history and touches many of Morison’s own passions - from the early Abnaki tribes, to the great European explorers, to the island residents and rusticators, of which Morison was one, owning ‘cottages’ in both Northeast Harbor and Tremont.