NH's 2020 Route 1 Read

Route One Reads is a virtual reading trip along Route One. For this year's summer road trip the Center for the Book in each state along Route One was asked to select a work of historical fiction. Last fall we did a survey to select our featured book and the choice of our readers was Peyton Place by Grace Metalious.

 

Peyton Place has sold over 10 million copies and inspired a film and a television series and generated a storm of controversy around a young woman of French heritage living in a small New Hampshire town.

 

Metalious, a native of Manchester, NH, sets the tone of the novel from the very beginning:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an uncharted season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged-edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgement, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to see the first traces of a false softening."

For further reading we suggest the sequel, called Return to Peyton Place (there is a 1999 Gramercy Books edition that includes both novels) and Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets: Sex and Race in Peyton Place by Sally Hirsh-Dickinson.

 

If you are interested in some background information NH Public Radio did a piece on Peyton Place 60 Years Later and one on Driving Backwards: Telling Gilmanton's Story Beyond Peyton Place.To learn more about the life of Grace Metalious, and for a more extensive bibliography, check out the article by  Robert B. Perreault on page 4 of the Fall 2006 issue of Book Notes.