SOURCE: "Images of Nineteenth Century Maine Farming in the Prose and Poetry of R.P.T. Coffin and C.A. Stephens," in Agricultural History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 120-29.

In the following essay, Anderson explores Coffin's writings and those of another Maine author, C.A. Stephens, with regard to their "utility to historians. "

Long before historians turned to matters of daily life as objects of inquiry, poets and novelists dealt with the essentials of the human condition. Authors often have searched for universal elements in the lives of our ancestors. The better poets and novelists offered their readers images that captured the essence of common people's lives. This literature, then, is an often untapped source for the historian trying to understand the experiences in earlier generations.

Life on a nineteenth-century Maine farm is a theme explored by a number of authors of both that century and ours. Two...