A Literary History of Saunderstown

Saunderstown Rhode Island was named for John Aldrich Saunders. In 1814 he started a shipyard on the Narrow River, later expanded to other locations on the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. Shipbuilding soon became the dominant industry in this formerly farming community, due to John Saunders innovative ship designs. He invented the raisable centerboard when all his competitors were building keeled boats. The centerboard enabled his sloops and schooners to get up shallow estuaries to load cargo at the source.

I did not know this when I wrote “The Better Boat” which tells of another brilliantly innovative boat designer, in 1954. But thanks to John Saunders, the Aurora has a centerboard. The shipbuilding industry in Narragansett Bay has been twice decimated by storms: the hurricane of 1938 and again by Hurricane Carol in 1954.

The grandson of John Saunders, Stillman Saunders started to innovate with building steam-powered vessels, and in 1885 launched an entirely new venture: The Circle for Mutual Improvement. Its initial 48 members hosted literary evenings and raised enough money to found the Willett Free Library, still going strong today. In the streets adjacent to the library, literary folks began buying or renting summer homes.

Owen Wister rented a house at 25 Waterway in 1901. By 1906 he had started building a compound of four shingle-style houses known collectively as Crowfield in Plum Point. He lived there for the rest of his life. Though you’ve probably never heard of Wister, he is one of the most consequential American novelists. His hugely successful 1902 novel The Virginian was the first cowboy novel. It created the genre of the Western, both novels and films, and gave birth to an archetype that is uniquely American and influences our identity to this day.

Before The Virginian, stories about the west were lurid dime novel tales of outlaws. The Virginian introduced the noble cowboy, tall, dark, and handsome, a hero living by his own moral code. Along the way he contends with hostile Indians, chivalrously romances the local schoolmarm newly arrived from “back East,” and witnesses the hanging of a cattle rustler. In one memorable scene, the villain Trampas flings a murderous insult in the Virginian’s teeth after losing at cards. Our hero calmly places his pistol on the table and says: “When you call me that, smile!” In the climactic scene he finally faces down the bad guy who has long had it coming in the Western’s first shootout duel in the street. Single-handedly, Wister created all of the imagery endlessly reshuffled in countless later Western novels and films. The Virginian itself was filmed six times, as well as spawning a TV series of the same name.

In 1897, Edith Wharton purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island. Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly." She spent thousands to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds. Finally, in 1902, she gave up on Newport. She designed and moved to The Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novels (including The House of Mirth) before moving permanently to France in 1911. In short, almost all of Wharton’s literary career occurred after she left Rhode Island.

But Edith wasn’t the only literary Wharton woman. Her cousin, Francis Willing Wharton, was a short story writer who lived in the Saunderstown neighborhood off Ferry Road. Francis wrote witty urbane stories of skirmishes between the sexes that were published in the literary magazines of the day -- Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Cosmopolitan -- around the turn of the century. Here’s an example: “What is the use of your six feet of length, and forty-four or six or eight inches round the chest, whatever it is, if you don’t do anything with them? Now don’t say you used to play football, because that is worn threadbare. When I was a little girl I jumped rope, but I haven’t been going on that ever since.” Edith Wharton, in nearby Newport, was a frequent visitor to her literary cousin just as Edith was finding her footing as a writer.

And then there’s the LaFarge’s, the true cultural dynasty of our town. It starts with John LaFarge, a hugely successful and innovative stain glass artist, contemporary and rival to Louis Comfort Tiffany. From New York, he came to Newport as a young man to study under William Morris Hunt. There he met and married Margaret Mason Perry (granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry). They had eight children: two famous architects (Christopher Grant LaFarge and Oliver Hazard Perry LaFarge) and at least one artist (Bancel LaFarge). John LaFarge’s stain glass windows are found in famous churches, chapels, and libraries in Boston, New York, and further afield. In Rhode Island they grace churches in Providence, Lincoln, and Salve Regina University in Newport.

Christopher Grant LaFarge, the eldest son, has been called "America's leading church architect." He designed the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan and the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Providence (with stained glass by his father), among many others. He also designed the tilework for the New York subway system. Through the firm’s extensive work with then-governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt the LaFarge family formed a lifelong friendship with Roosevelt, a frequent visitor to Saunderstown.

It was Bancel LaFarge, the artist, who made the move from New York and Newport to Saunderstown in 1903, joining the summer artistic colony of Owen Wister and many others in the Ferry Road neighborhood. With Bancel, the LaFarge family established permanent roots in Saunderstown. He had two sons, an architect and an artist, neither of whom seem to have remained in Rhode Island.

The LaFarge’s as writers start with Christopher Grant LaFarge’s first son Christoper Grant LaFarge Jr., known as “Kipper.” He grew up in New York City and in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, and later moved to the family farm (named The River Farm) near Saunderstown, which was given to him by his father. Initially an architect like his father, the firm collapsed during the Great Depression, and he abandoned architecture and became a novelist. In 1932, LaFarge moved his family to Kent, England, where he wrote his first novel, Hoxsie Sells His Acres (1934), a verse chronicle about a Rhode Island landowner who decides to sell his farmland for development. LaFarge’s goal in writing his novel in verse was to "make this a comprehensible form as interesting as the novel in prose and more moving." In 1934, he moved back to the United States, where he split his time between Rhode Island and New York. Several of his subsequent books were also set in Rhode Island, and he became known as a skillful observer of this region. He also began contributing stories and poems to magazines such as the New Yorker, The American, Harper's, and the Saturday Review of Literature. His second novel, Each to the Other (1939), was also written in verse. Its plot revolved around the domestic difficulties of a father and a son, a reflection of LaFarge’s own life. It was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. LaFarge's third novel, The Sudden Guest (1946, written in prose), was likewise a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. Set in Rhode Island, its central character is an unpleasant old woman who reminisces about the great New England Hurricane of 1938 as she prepares for the arrival of another hurricane. With its acutely observed protagonist—self-righteous, rigid, and anti-Semitic—the story forms a parable intended to remind Americans of the cost of isolationism. It was LaFarge’s most successful book, selling more than half a million copies. His last verse novel, Beauty for Ashes (1953), was about relationships revolving around a beautiful young woman and three men in rural Rhode Island. He also published three books of short stories.

“Kipper” LaFarge’s son was Thomas Sergeant La Farge, who wrote six novels. Thomas’s son was Paul LaFarge who wrote five novels. Both father and son were notable for their highly experimental approach to the literary novel. Neither seem to have set foot in Rhode Island.

Christopher Grant LaFarge’s second son, Oliver Hazard Perry LaFarge, was also a novelist, as well as an anthropologist of Native American culture. He wrote a dozen scholarly works about the Navajo and other Indians of the Southwest. He also wrote five novels and three collections of short stories, most of which were also sympathetic portrayals of the Navajo people. His best-known novel is Laughing Boy, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. He grew up in Newport, but after graduating Harvard he spent the rest of his life in the Southwest.

Oliver’s estranged son, Peter LaFarge became a famous Greenwich Village folksinger, but not until after competing in rodeos, serving on an aircraft carrier during the Korean war (and working as an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Division (CID)), boxing and competing in prizefights, studying acting and performing on stage. Despite his estrangement from his father, his songs are mostly about Native Americans, such as his best-known “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

Notably, of all of the creative talent orbiting around Saunderstown, only “Kipper” LaFarge ever wrote anything about Rhode Island. The novelists Owen Wister (who lived here) and Oliver LaFarge (who didn’t) both wrote from their experiences in the American West.