Turner Buckminster

Turner is the book’s central character and protagonist. As the story begins, Turner is in his early teens, newly arrived in the community of Phippsburg, on the north-east coast of the United States (i.e. New England). He is the son of the recently appointed minister at the First Congregational Church, and despite what narration suggests was a relatively significant degree of success establishing his own identity in the much larger, much more cosmopolitan city of Boston, Massachusetts (from where his family moved), Turner’s identity in Phippsburg is primarily defined by his relationship to his father. This set of circumstances, along with other jarring aspects of his new life (including having to learn to play a different kind of baseball from the sort at which he was successful on Boston), establishes Turner’s central struggle over the course of the narrative, one that simultaneously defines...