Story of Mount Desert Island

The Story of Mount Desert Island 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.