Case 3.4

Foster, Jeanne Robert, and Noel Riedinger-Johnson. Adirondack Portraits: A Piece of Time. 1st ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. A York State Book PS3511.O689A67 1986.

Jeanne Robert Foster is one of the most interesting Adirondack poets I read about. Rubbing elbows with the likes of John Butler Yeats (father of poet William Butler Yeats), Ford Maddox Ford, T.S. Eliot, and Pablo Picasso (to name a few), Foster began careers in modeling and acting, even being photographed for Vanity Fair, before committing to her first love, writing (Gilborn, Jeanne Foster: A Woman of Parts).

Neighbors of Yesterday and Adirondack Portraits by Jeanne Robert Foster are unique in that they almost exclusively focus on those people who settled in the Adirondacks in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, as opposed to the physical landscape which is most often the focus of poetry from the same time period. Through a narrative style and various personas, Foster is able to provide a true picture of those early settlers’ experiences in the unforgiving Adirondack wilderness. “Permeating Neighbors of Yesterday is a vitality that imbues the human spirit even in the grimmest circumstances” (Londraville, “Introduction to the 2002 Edition”).